GAINS On Podcast S2E15 – Koozie Group Strengthens Cross-Functional Planning

Joe Davis (00:01):
Hello again. Supply Chain Dynamos, network optimizers and strategy aficionados. Joe Davis here, your friendly neighborhood podcast host. Welcome you back for another thought provoking episode of GAINS On the show that dives deep into the world of supply chain strategy, planning and design. Brought to you as always by the brilliant minds at GAINS. Today we’re joined by someone who has lived almost every role in supply chain. Haroun Habib, senior supply chain analyst at Koozie Group. With
nearly four decades of experience from the green bar paper era to modern unified planning, Haroun has seen the entire discipline evolve firsthand. In our conversation, Haroun shares how Koozie Group uses data, collaboration, and a disciplined weekly S&OP rhythm to keep teams aligned, improve decision-making, and stay ahead of both seasonal swings and unpredictable surges in demand. You’ll hear how
Haroun’s team uses GAINS workflows to surface risks early, sharpen accountability across departments, and continuously refine processes and data quality. If you are interested in practical, real world supply chain leadership, especially how to guide teams through long lead times, unexpected spikes and complex supplier networks, this episode is one you won’t want to miss. Ready to get into it? Let’s go. You are a senior supply chain analyst, you said, but you’ve had every job under the sun in supply chain.

Haroun Habeeb (01:32):
I’ve done every role of supply chain.

Joe Davis (01:34):
Awesome. So I imagine this is something you’ve been at for a while.

Haroun Habeeb (01:37):
Yes, four decades.

Joe Davis (01:38):
Four decades. Really?

Haroun Habeeb (01:40):
Almost. Close enough.

Joe Davis (01:42):
That’s amazing because you don’t look like you could have been in this for four decades

Haroun Habeeb (01:47):
And I was in the military as well.
Joe Davis (01:47):
Well, there, that’s quite right. Wow. So is that sort of what got you interested in supply chain? You start with your time in the military?

Haroun Habeeb (01:53):
No, no. What got me interested in supply chain was an accident was because my position that I started at was an artist, and it was pretty boring. I didn’t think it would be, but it was boring. And then the
company decided to implement an ERP system using systems and computers, and a lot of people were afraid of that. I just volunteered for it. And here we are.

Joe Davis (02:14):
And here we are. So you’ve been with supply chain for four decades, so that’s quite a bit of time. I’m sure, did you start out in spreadsheets?

Haroun Habeeb (02:25):
No, because there weren’t laptops or computers either. Right. So it was the green bar charts that you
Joe Davis (02:31):
Oh yeah yeah

Haroun Habeeb (02:33):
So that was the first report I ever seen in my life, and it was explaining to me how it works. So it was a struggle, but without the computing power and supply. Matter of fact, it wasn’t even called supply chain. It was just purchasing or all the different components were all individual and they didn’t work together. So ultimately here we are in the future where they really all compliment each other.

Joe Davis (02:54):
And I imagine you were there for that whole evolution to kind of

Haroun Habeeb (02:56):
Absolutely. As well as technology.

Joe Davis (02:58):
Well, speaking of technology, what kind of things are you able to do now that you weren’t able to do before?

Haroun Habeeb (03:03):
Well, obviously before, again, not having the collaboration, not having the connections with the other things. In today’s environment, now we’re more closer connected. The data, the reports, the KPIs are more relatable to the other things. And it’s known that this reacts from one thing to another.

Joe Davis (03:21):
And you talk about being able to that unified language and being able to get ready to speak the same language. And with those KPIs, are you able to convince folks that we should work together because it’s in your best interest to?

Haroun Habeeb (03:34):
Well, yes, and more importantly, there’s an accountability factor, whereas before certain other units were excluded from being accountable for the things that supply chain is doing. So a lot of times supply chain would just kind of a sidebar thing, not understanding how it impacted the business or how it benefited the business, or say sales and marketing and say, Hey, we want everything, buy lots of the stuff, but hey, finance team is like, Hey, why did you spend so much money? You got all these things going on. But with the advent of technology now that goes away and everybody looks at the same data points and everybody has some role in that exercise.

Joe Davis (04:16):
Well, that’s great to be able to be accessible that everybody can get to it as opposed to somebody being the keeper of truth.

Haroun Habeeb (04:23):
Correct. Correct. Yeah. And so now we know based on our software tools and what we have, it is the source of truth and everybody has some accountability in that.

Joe Davis (04:31):
So when we spoke previously, you talked about how continuous improvement, which is something that we love talking about, is not just a motto, it’s a muscle.

Haroun Habeeb (04:41):
Absolutely.

Joe Davis (04:41):
Can you expand on that a little bit? Tell me a little about that.

Haroun Habeeb (04:43):
Well, yeah, I mean, now it’s to the point where continuous improvement is part of all processes, including the data. So while you may have the ability to improve a process to take out waste and loss and things like that, we’re also now looking at the data itself. There’s a continuous improvement there because you have garbage in, garbage out, and the analogy with data. So now we’re, hey, we’re exercise to say, Hey, you know what? Let’s continuously improve our data based on things that we discover over
time. So last time something’s discovered either in a process, the data or whatever it is, we’re saying, Hey, how can we improve on that? Let’s put something in place, a process to eliminate those issues related to the data, the process or the exercise itself.

Joe Davis (05:24):
What does that look like week to week? Is it

Haroun Habeeb (05:26):
Well, for us, it’s improved dramatically in terms of the decision making process. Previously it was a bit ambiguous in terms of how I made a decision, whether it was supply or demand. But now with the tools
we have, the data, the continuous improvement, it’s pretty clear cut now what decisions you should make, and if, again, process wise, if it’s a decision you should not make, then it rolls up to the next approval level to decide, Hey, what should we do In this particular case?

Joe Davis (05:55):
Have you found that that’s bringing GAINS on, has sped up that decision making?

Haroun Habeeb (05:59):
Oh, absolutely. I mean, it was kind of hard at first. It’s like, Hey, you can lead ’em to the water, but you can’t make ’em drink. Absolutely. And not understanding, but I would ask the question back when something would happen and say, well, what tool are you using? What data? Are you using? Yeah. Oh, I’m using this spreadsheet. Or we felt this or felt that. I’m like, no. I lead them back to the water and say, Hey, this is the tool. This is what we’re planning to. So we’re planning to this data point of what we’re
using to decide whether on the supply or whatever demand planning. And so the realization has come about it. Oh, okay, we play a role at Yes, you have to participate in that. Or unfortunately, if some event occurred, then it rolls either downhill or uphill, says, Hey, this all what you decided. Yeah. Oh, I didn’t realize the impact. So yeah, it’s become more relevant now based on that,

Joe Davis (06:45):
It seems like you take an educational approach.

Haroun Habeeb (06:48):
Oh, absolutely.

Joe Davis (06:48):
Talking to people and showing them the impact of what decisions.

Haroun Habeeb (06:51):
Well, yeah, when I could tell you that it feels like or I, but when you show them the actual data and you bring it up, say, Hey, I do have access to this, and do you see here this is the performance of these products or not? Or whatever? Yeah, it’d be the light bulb still goes off. Oh, wow. And I can’t tell you how many people tell me, oh, wow. I just really didn’t realize what this tool could afford us in terms of knowledge and information about our products and where we going.

Joe Davis (07:18):
Well, you don’t know what you don’t know. Right?

Haroun Habeeb (07:19):
Absolutely. But the facts are the facts, right? You can say how you feel, but it’s black and white it.

Joe Davis (07:23):
Yes. A lot of the customers that we work with have grown through acquisition. Mergers or acquisition, and Koozie is no exception to that.

Haroun Habeeb: (07:31):
That is correct.

Joe Davis (07:32):
Tell me, how do you manage growing through acquisition and keeping all the things together?

Haroun Habeeb (07:38):
Well, the first thing we learned is that you can’t have everybody doing things differently. So the first thing we do is through an acquisition is that they have to get onto our legacy system. We go through an implementation process, we understand their data and their history, and we get all that information and we apply it to our legacy system. At the same time, using GAINS, we take that same information that they have from their previous legacy systems and apply it to GAINS. If we’ve had an acquisition where they didn’t have very much information, so we had to do our best to do some estimates and things like that and get it into GAINS. But that is our process onto our legacy system and then onto GAINS, and then all processes will be standardized, whether that’s procurement, planning, or otherwise.

Joe Davis (08:22):
It goes back to that strong communication and collaboration. Awesome. want to talk for a minute about seasonality. This is something that we’ve talked about. We talked about with Aaron from the Home Depot. We were talking to him earlier with all kinds of crazy seasonality coming into factors there. And I imagine that with Koozie Group, you guys sell a lot of promotional materials, but also a lot of very seasonal materials, right?

Haroun Habeeb (08:41):
Yeah. Yes, we do. We have quite a few, and we’re a promotional it runs the gamut. You got to have things, there’s a bodily swing one way versus the other. And then we have things that are rock steady and very predictable. In the instances where we have these outlier, these situations where things are very seasonal, we pretty much know what those are. We have a process for dealing with those. So for example, beanies, which is a more of a winter type thing, late fall early into the first quarter of the year,
and the VARs are extremely high. We know what this is. So we have a dedicated process to manage these vastly seasonal type things. So we look at the items even in the off season, where are we? How are we doing? We look at the supply. And then to complicate even further, the lead time, is very long. Anywhere from nine to ten months lead time. So we really have to plan away in advance. And so between our collaboration with product management, supply, demand planning team, as well as the
supplier. So we’re all connected together in terms of what we’re going to do, how we’re going to execute this plan. So leading up to those high peak seasons, we know where we stand in terms of our inventory, our sales, the ramp up, and the let down later on. So pretty much, I’m going to say we nailed it, but it’s pretty good in terms of that ramp up and the let down to not have excess or a shortfall for that matter, leading into the sales.

Joe Davis (10:04):
When you find yourself with one of those black swan incidents, right? Taylor Swift has suddenly decided that everybody at the concert needs a Koozie, you get an order for a million, million and a half, what do
you do?

Haroun Habeeb (10:19):
So just looking at our product portfolio, we already know items that we could support, something like that. And so we kind of know what those product groups are or products themselves. And so depending on
what the request is, we pretty much know there’s no way we can support that or we can support that or somewhere in between. But we’ll make an attempt. So for example, we know that if it’s a make item, we have control over that. It’s not the other suppliers, 100% us. And so typically we can support those large type orders because we get them frequently throughout a year at factory. Yes, yes, yes. And if it’s a sourced item, well then again, if it’s something that’s plausible, then we’ll reach out to supplier. They’re used to this,

Joe Davis (10:58):
Yeah

Haroun Habeeb (10:59):
We’ll make that request to them, see can they support that. And if they can, then we do so and advise our customer. Yes. And we can take that on. But we’ve had several.

Joe Davis (11:07):
Do you share forecast information with your supplier?

Haroun Habeeb (11:09):
Yes, very good point. But we do that on a number of items. We share the forecast with the supplier, and as the forecast evolves monthly or quarterly, we ask that often. So they at least have a indication of what they can expect in terms of us sending orders to them. Now they’re going to make it, if they wreck it, it’s on them, but we let them know, Hey, look, this is our projections and we give them purchase orders well in advance. So we learn that helping them plan their capacity constraints helps us and helps them both.

Joe Davis (11:38):
Right. Well, and that’s what I always say, what’s so often gets lost in supply chain is the importance of being a good customer to your vendor.

Haroun Habeeb (11:46):
That’s absolutely right.

Joe Davis (11:47):
These are the folks who are going to bail you out when you need to be bailed out.

Haroun Habeeb (11:50):
Not every customer is a good customer.

Joe Davis (11:51):
That’s true. It’s right. The customers who are good share forecasts and share information, give you plenty of time for repeat orders and don’t make you express ship things. You can build a relationship with us so that you’ll get preferable treatment. And I said that people, I think it’s, I don’t know why people don’t make that connection.

Haroun Habeeb (12:08):
Well, as long as you have some consistency, you have volume, they wouldn’t be for everything. But we’ve been in this business for a long time. We’ve got suppliers that’s been with us for decades as well, and they know us. And again, we have that collaboration with them as well. It works out pretty good.

Joe Davis (12:24):
Earlier we were talking about tariffs, everybody’s favorite subject, right? I’m sure by the time that this interview airs, there’ll be several more, and ish, there probably has been since we started talking. But what I want to know is like you say, you’ve got a lot of different suppliers. You’ve got a lot of different products that you bring in. How do you, when you’re working with a client who comes to you and say, I want X product that you sell in X volume. Correct. Are you able to steer them toward something that is a
non tariff product?

Haroun Habeeb (12:58):
So our policy is if we have the order and we have the inventory, we’re taking it.

Joe Davis (13:01):
Got it.

Haroun Habeeb (13:02):
Okay. And so as it relates to the tariff situation, obviously it’s based on the country of origin. So what we did was we applied the country of origin and the port origin to all of our SKULs in GAINS. And so in the event that now we have this massive increase for China, we have the ability to know
what’s at stake for us as well as our customer base. So we would not want to purchase items that the tariff supersedes our profit margins. So we stop all those shipments. We don’t bring them in until we understand what’s happening. There may be some timeline if it may start at the 1st of December, and then we got the lead time. We have time to ship it and get it clear customs before that happens. And then we are able to look across the board, say, well, wait a minute. We can ship this from, say, Cambodia, for example, and we’ll move the product to Cambodia. Now, obviously it depends on the status of if it’s already produced, and kind of we just have to wait out the whole tariff situation until we’ve done this a couple of times already. This Yeah, this entire year. Yeah. I mean, pretty much the
whole industry is doing the same thing. Stop shipments, move it here, move it there. Gotcha. The tariffs are released, and we have this mass shipment. This just happened earlier this year where a lot of Chinese shipments were on hold just because of the tariffs. Once the tariff schedule changed, then everybody just starts shipping. But you had a logistics problem because everybody’s trying to ship all those things at once.

Joe Davis (14:28):
Well, it’s funny, we’ve talked a couple of times about how COVID really underlined what supply chain is, and you don’t have to explain to anybody what supply chain is now.

Haroun Habeeb (14:37):
Oh, yes, yes.

Joe Davis (14:39):
So it’s always surprising to see how we talk about supply chain, but it was really a supply web or a supply network where it’s just overlapping like spaghetti. And so something like tariffs or having a hold on shipment or logistic problems, it’s so sensitive. So do you find, I know you use Oracle and GAINS. Does that allow you the flexibility you need to be able to make those changes at speed?

Haroun Habeeb (15:04):
As best we could. It’s almost like an aircraft carrier. You turn it around, it’s kind of difficult, but you can. And so we’ve kind of put all the data points in place to allow us or to afford us the opportunity to make the best decision we could relating to the impact of those tariffs.

Joe Davis (15:20):
When you’re using GAINS, which workflows or alerts do you use to make sure that you’re sending things the right place at the right time?

Haroun Habeeb (15:28):
So we’ve created a number of workflows in GAINS to indicate that things are most critical. So obviously if I have demand and no supplier purchase for, well, that’s first one that pops up the supply planner and there’s several others. It could be things I created some trend indicators that if the sales are increasing faster than the predicted forecast, the notifications there. Next topic on that takes you to those items
and you can see, oh wow, I can see the last two months are exceeding sales and the forecast in the next quarter or three months is not going to meet that. And then we do an assessment of why did this happen? Was it some large orders or what the case may be? Make some adjustments if necessary, predicated on that,

Joe Davis (16:13):
Proves a whole continuous improvement.

Haroun Habeeb (16:15):
Absolutely. Right.

Joe Davis (16:16):
Just learning from every lesson. That’s fantastic. So you’re able to, at Koozie, you’re able to use approach where you keep everybody pulling in the same direction. How do you manage that?

Haroun Habeeb (16:26):
So we’ve instituted several processes far as to continue. We’ve learned things. And so if you do not inform or communicate often, then you lose their interest. And so what we’ve instituted is a mini weekly S&OP process. And so we don’t take everything, but we take the items that are most impactful that are at risk to the business, and we put that together in an assessment tool. We send that out to all the stakeholders, and we meet for an hour weekly to go over these items. So there’s clear cut. No one is going to be surprised about the situation. We have actions, we have the situation, the actions, the status of the items. Are they production ready, are they on the way? Whatever the situation is. So everybody’s clearly informed, and it’s a back and forth collaboration that includes sales, operations, supply chain individuals. There’s a few finance folks that participate.

Joe Davis (17:25):
That’s great. I worked in the hotel industry for a little while, and we had a meeting like that that they developed, and it was called a NETMA meeting. And I didn’t have any idea what NETMA meant. I finally asked, what is a NETMA meeting? Oh, nobody ever tells me anything. We put this meeting in once a week so that nobody can say, oh, nobody ever told me that. And so it’s a similar idea where to build that community. If anybody, you can offer advice to somebody who’s in your position starting out, or maybe
somebody moving from planning and supply planning, supply chain planning and spreadsheets to moving to a digital environment, do you have any advice for somebody taking that journey?

Haroun Habeeb (18:11):
Number one is implement the new tool right away.

Joe Davis (18:15):
Okay.

Haroun Habeeb (18:15):
Don’t waste any more time because you’re losing ground with that. Number two is the tool you implement. Do not try to customize that new tool to be the old tool because you’re going to have a problem and evolve out of the box and evolve to the new tool. And then after you do that, then you’ll have the ability to make customizations or recommend customizations to that tool to enhance the new process.

Joe Davis (18:41):
That’s great advice. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it, Haroun. Thank you so much. Haroun Habeeb. And that wraps up today’s conversation with Harun Habeeb from Koozie Group, A big thank you to Haroun for sharing his practical, grounded perspective on how consistent processes and clear communications support stronger planning across organizations. Here’s what we learned. When teams commit to reliable data, shared KPIs, and a steady S&OP rhythm, planning becomes more predictable, and collaboration gets easier. GAINS helps Koozie Group to surface risks earlier, keep priorities aligned across sales and operations, make week to week decisions with more confidence, as well as build a structure that keeps everyone focused and ready to adjust when demand shifts or constraints emerge. If today’s discussion inspired you to think about strengthening your own planning workflows, head to gainsystems.com to learn more. And if you’re enjoying the season of GAINS On, be sure to subscribe and share with a colleague because lots more insights and transformation stories are on the way. So keep learning, keep optimizing, and remember in the ever-changing world of supply chain, we’re all in this together. This is Joe Davis signing off from GAINS On. Until next time.

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