"Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated" - Confucius

Once upon a time people were confused by TLA's - Three letter acronyms. People love trotting out TLA's to make what they are saying sound good. ERP - Enterprise Resource Planning. TQM - Total Quality Management. TPM - Total Preventative Maintenance. IBM - International Brotherhood of Magicians. MRP - Many Reams of Paper. It seems to sound so good when someone says "what does that stand for?".

Back in the 1980's there was SOP - Sales and Operations Planning. The idea was that you would buy a planning system which would hold lots of detail [forecasts by SKU - whoops Stock Keeping Unit] and production plans in the MPS [whoops - Master Production Schedule], and you needed this added up [=aggregate] into families to help see the wood from the trees. That way the executive could make decisions without reference down to the detail. SOP in a nutshell. You also need one set of numbers, truth and teamwork.

In the last few years Integrated Business Planning [IBP] has been used for pretty much the same concept. The only difference was that it explicitly covered some more ground - Innovation, Finance and possible Human Resource Planning. You still need one set of numbers, truth and teamwork.

But it now looks like inflation has ravaged "letter acronyms", and we now have FLA's - Four letter acronyms. I have now seen someone refer to EIBP - Enterprise Integrated Business Planning. I reached for my dictionary to see what was the difference between "Enterprise" and "Business" - there is none.

Apparently this is designed to make it even more difficult for companies to do "IBP". It is yet another level of "maturity" - and another level of difficulty. Beyond "IBP" there is "Enterprise IBP". Beyond this galaxy there is another.

Surely it is time to keep things simple, and not pretend to that what we have to offer is so complicated, that it is going to take you for ever to get there?

SOP/IBP has always been described as "common-sense organised". Its just that common-sense and organisation are not so common. But is it really going to make it any more easy to do, if we spend time on coming up with four letter acronyms, when three were hard enough?