Three Ways to Fulfill Your Wish List With Integrated Business Planning

IBP - Integrated Business Planning

The list-making time of year is upon us. Kids fine-tune their gift lists, adults hustle through holiday to-do lists, and your Government Contractor (GovCon) leadership team tallies what it will take to reach your business goals in the new year.

We encourage you to dream big for 2024 and consider adding integrated business planning to the list of strategies that can spell success for your company.

IBP—Not Just For The Heavyweights Anymore

You’ve probably heard about integrated business plans (IBPs) for years, mostly in the context of large corporations. International players create an IBP to break down outdated organizational silos across a global enterprise and integrate financial planning and analysis (FP&A), supply chain and other operations, and marketing and sales. IBPs aim to synchronize far-flung divisions around company-wide goals, with decisions driven by real-time internal, industry, and global market data.

But news flash—the tech tools for IBP collaboration and agility have expanded beyond big business. Your small-to-medium-sized GovCon can grow revenue and manage risks by developing an IBP tailored specifically to the market conditions you face. How? Start with a cloud-based, scalable FP&A platform, such as Nue, designed uniquely for project-based companies serving government and commercial customers. This means you can build your IBP using the extensive and specific data required for federal contracting and compliance.

Three Pathways To A Profitable New Year

With customized FP&A tools in place, your IBP can become an important component in growing your business and managing risk in 2024.

  1. Set a strategic direction that gets everyone onboard. When your whole team—from the CEO to your latest entry level hire—is clear about company goals and what constitutes measurable success, you have an easier time rallying the troops. With rolling forecasts and the ability to run an unlimited number of what-if scenarios, advanced FP&A software transforms a market shift from an IBP disruptor into an opportunity to fine-tune a strategy that plays to your strengths.
  2. Bolster accountability with transparency. FP&A enables all your divisions—from marketing and sales, to human resources (HR), to product development—to access the same dashboard of data plumbed from a wealth of internal and external sources. Stakeholders can gain a better understanding of how their actions affect progress toward achieving your firm’s goals. Your team can quickly calculate how a new agency rule, cost increase, rate change, or loss of a contract bid will impact the bottom line this quarter, this year, and/or in the years to come. Staff can become more accountable to each other as well as to the overall company goal when they have visibility into all divisions’ contributions.
  3. Information is power—use it. GovCons know that the price of doing profitable business with government agencies includes significant information requirements. These contractual obligations, in turn, impose lots of requisite recordkeeping and calculations. Your GovCon can turn these chores into a strategic advantage that wins points for timely and accurate responses to federal regulators and contracting officers. Just a few examples include compliant responses to Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) budget requests, along with a variety of cost and indirect rate reporting. Once FP&A frees your finance team from manually collecting and maintaining required data, you can turn their creativity loose on more competitive ways to capture new business.

A Word About ‘What If’

One of the most powerful benefits you can gain from integrated business planning based on advanced FP&A software is confidence. In the short term, the ability to run unlimited scenarios and rolling forecasts allow constant, automatic adjustments when the key performance indicators (KPIs) that most affect your business change, whether suddenly or gradually. In the long term, what-if analyses allow your leadership team to model operational risk and better sidestep or cope competently with inevitable challenges. The more right moves you make, the happier your stakeholders will be, be they customers, vendors, banks, or investors.

What better way to start the new year than with a positive outlook? Please contact us for more information and a free demonstration of Nue and see for yourself the benefits of an FP&A platform built for the way you do business.