# Missing Executive Sponsorship

IBP without sustained executive involvement doesn't fail dramatically. It just slowly becomes irrelevant.

# The Pattern

A supply chain leader — typically a VP or director — recognizes the need for cross-functional planning and launches an IBP process. The first few cycles have energy: peers attend out of curiosity or obligation, decisions get made, and progress feels real.

Then reality sets in. The sales VP skips a month because of a customer crisis. Finance sends a delegate because month-end close overlaps. Marketing never fully engaged in the first place. Within 6 months, the "IBP meeting" is attended by supply chain and a rotating cast of proxies who can't make commitments. The process limps along as a supply chain planning exercise — useful, but not integrated.

Eventually, someone asks "why are we doing this?" and nobody has a compelling answer. The meeting gets canceled or downgraded to a biweekly ops review. IBP is declared "tried and failed."

# Why It's Tempting

Supply chain sees the need most clearly. They live with the consequences of disconnected planning — expediting, excess inventory, missed shipments. It's natural for them to drive the initiative.
Asking the CEO to own a recurring meeting feels like a big ask. Especially early on, when the process is unproven and the value is theoretical.
"Let's prove the concept first." The logic goes: run a few cycles, show value, then elevate. In practice, without executive authority from the start, you never generate enough value to justify elevating.
Peer-level sponsorship seems sufficient. A VP of supply chain should be able to convene peers. In theory. In practice, peer-level requests compete with every other priority, and attendance becomes optional.

# Why It Fails

No single function can force cross-functional participation. IBP requires sales to share pipeline data, marketing to commit to promotional plans, finance to reconcile numbers, and operations to expose capacity constraints. No VP-level peer can compel all of that.

Without executive authority, conflicting priorities always win. When the sales VP has to choose between a customer meeting and an IBP meeting, the customer wins. That's the right call for sales — but it breaks the IBP process. Only a boss above all functions can make IBP attendance non-negotiable.

Decisions require authority above the functional level. The most valuable IBP decisions are trade-offs between functions: accept lower margins to capture volume, invest in capacity at the expense of short-term profit, allocate constrained supply away from one channel to protect another. These decisions require someone with authority over all functions — typically the GM, BU leader, or CEO.

The process can't self-correct. When IBP falters — bad forecast accuracy, poor meeting discipline, missing data — it needs someone with authority to diagnose and fix. Without a sponsor, problems get worked around rather than resolved.

# What To Do Instead

The IBP executive sponsor should be:

Attribute	Why It Matters
Above the functional level	GM, BU Leader, or CEO — someone whose authority spans sales, operations, and finance
Willing to chair the MBR	The Management Business Review is the executive's meeting, not a meeting they attend
Committed to the cadence	Monthly attendance, not "when I can make it"
Willing to enforce participation	Must be willing to hold VPs accountable for attendance and preparation

The executive sponsor's role is not to run the IBP process — that's the process owner's job. The sponsor's role is to:

Chair the executive meeting — Make decisions, resolve trade-offs, approve the plan.
Enforce attendance — VP-level peers attend in person, not via proxy.
Remove obstacles — When the process stalls (bad data, lack of participation, missing resources), the sponsor intervenes.
Model the behavior — If the CEO treats IBP as important, the organization follows. If the CEO skips, the signal is unmistakable.

Be honest about what you're building. Without executive sponsorship, you can run a useful supply chain planning process — but don't call it IBP. Calling it IBP sets expectations for cross-functional integration that you won't be able to deliver, and the resulting disappointment makes it harder to launch properly later.

# Warning Signs

You might be in this anti-pattern if:

The most senior regular attendee at the IBP meeting is a director
VP-level peers routinely send delegates instead of attending
IBP is described as "a supply chain thing" or "an operations initiative"
Decisions made in the IBP meeting get overturned in bilateral conversations afterward
The process owner spends more time selling the meeting than running it
There's no executive scorecard — because no executive is asking for one

# Further Reading

Governance & Decision Rights — The RACI framework and escalation paths that depend on executive sponsorship.
Management Business Review — What the executive meeting should look like when sponsorship is working.
KPIs & Metrics — The executive scorecard that gives the sponsor a reason to stay engaged.

anti-pattern