The Business Modeler is the vital part of any Integrated Business Planning system. Even though a company can model their operations using Excel spreadsheets, such models are not linked to actual day-to-day operational data to provide feedback and are difficult to maintain.

The Business Modeler must integrate different aspects of the planning process into a single planning environment. For example, the Product Development department should be able to publish product release schedules, marketing department allocate marketing resources for new product releases, sales department allocate sales resources and estimate sales – this should automatically translate into revisions for plant capacity plans, financial plans, cash flow forecasts and raise “Red Flags” if the company does not have the available resources  at every level.  At the same time, feedback has to be provided from the operational ERP System to verify model performance and allow recalculating of model parameters based on actual results. All these operations have to be intuitive for the end users who understand and follow  well defined Integrated Business Planning.