When Continental Battery Systems lost the only person who could maintain its homegrown demand-planning tool, the business was suddenly without a reliable forecasting engine. What followed was a rapid reset.
In this episode of the GAINS On podcast, host Joe Davis welcomes Jeremy Kiel from CBS, Bobby Hathaway of Envista, and GAINS’ own Willis Wendell to unpack how CBS rebuilt demand planning under pressure. The conversation explores why the legacy tool reached its limits, how GAINS was selected, and how a phased rollout restored visibility while the business kept moving.
You’ll hear:
Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss part two of this real-world supply chain success story.
Joe Davis (00:01):
Hello again supply chain buffs, transformation trailblazers and the technologically curious. Joe Davis here, your Friendly Neighborhood podcast host. Welcome you to another enlightening episode of GAINS On, the show that breaks down the real work, real wins, and real lessons behind supply chain strategy, planning and design, powered as always, by the brilliant minds at GAINS. Today we’ve got a unique story of urgency, reinvention, and partnership. I’m joined by Jeremy Kiel from Continental Battery Systems, Bobby Hathaway from enVista, and GAINS’ own Willis Wendell, a trio who found themselves navigating a planning crisis that unfolded overnight. When CBS lost the only person who could maintain their homegrown Python place planning tool. The entire demand planning process stalled. What happened next was a rapid reset. GAINS stepping into stabilized forecasting, enVista providing planning as a service to keep business moving, and CBS charting a path towards a redesigned planning function. In part one of our two-part conversation, you’ll hear how this partnership came together, why the team rolled out GAINS in phases, and how early visibility improvements helped CBS keep inventory flowing during a disruptive moment. It’s a practical look at what it takes to reboot planning under pressure and how to do it the right way. Ready to get into it? Gentlemen, welcome to the show.
All guests (01:27):
Thanks Joe. Thanks, Joe. Thank you.
Joe Davis (01:30):
So the reason that I wanted to have you on the show today is I was going over some of our case studies and I came across this one I thought was pretty interesting. It’s the story of GAINS and Continental Battery, which we’ve talked about before, but this one was a little bit different because we had a partner in that as well. And Bobby, you and enVista were a partner in that, is that right?
Bobby Hathaway (01:52):
Yeah, it was. Yep.
Joe Davis (01:53):
Great. Well, how did that come about?
Bobby Hathaway (01:56):
Yeah, so I’ll jump in here and just jump into it. So within the project as partners, the GAINS team brought it to enVista and said there’s an opportunity to support a project with Continental Battery Systems. So we were kind of given the opportunity to come in and be a little bit of a supporting role. So enVista’s role in the project was really to provide planning as a service, which means enVista was effectively acting as staff augmentation using some of our planning subject matter experts in support of the CBS’s teams, their operational continuity as well as our GAINS partners during the implementation process. So our role was effectively to come in and help support the project overall and provide a little bit of subject matter expert background. So Willis, I don’t know if you want to expand on that or Jeremy, anything of how we got involved here?
Willis Wendell (02:50):
Yeah, I could chime in a little bit on that. So essentially our opportunity was initially focused on planning and we’ve done a whole lot with Continental Battery over the past roughly three years of our engagement with them. But at the time, essentially there was an opportunity to replace a homegrown solution that was doing demand planning and inventory parameter calculations. So that was really the initial driver to get involved and start with supply chain planning. And at that time CBS had not developed their own internal competence in planning, so they didn’t have a formalized planning function internally, and so we saw that as a gap that needed to be filled and that’s essentially why we brought in enVista.
Joe Davis (03:45):
Jeremy, let me ask you about that. A homegrown planning tool. I imagine that sounds pretty great, right? It’s customized, it does whatever you want to do, but I also imagine that it brings its own set of problems and that you’ve created it and you’re sort of limited to that. So what sort of pushed you over the edge in terms of wanting to stick with this home growing planning tool and then trying something new?
Jeremy Kiel (04:12):
Yeah, so the tool itself, it was something that was developed by an individual that was working for Continental in what we call the SIOP, the Director of SIOP role.
Jeremy Kiel (04:28):
And he had developed this tool mostly using Python scripting and some other things to effectively generate forecasts for the items that we were selling. And then those forecasts were creating stocking parameters that were being injected into our ERP system, which was driving both some purchasing and some internal replenishment. The tool was effective for what it was designed to do. As our company continued to grow and expand, we started to bump up against some of the limitations of the tool, which is when we initially started to engage GAINS about utilizing their software to help us with demand planning and forecasting and everything else. Around that time, this individual left our company and that rendered the tool virtually useless for the rest of us at that point because I most definitely as the newly christened director of inventory and network planning did not have the IT type experience to support that tool moving forward. And that is really what one accelerated our need to bridge the gap with the GAINS team. And that’s really where the team from enVista entered into our project of implementing GAINS.
Joe Davis (06:06):
So you had mentioned, Bobby, that planning as a service. What does planning as a service look like with, in your case with enVista and Continental?
Bobby Hathaway (06:15):
The planning as a service is somewhat of a unique type project within a project. A little bit of support is how it goes. And as Jeremy mentioned, when somebody suddenly leaves an organization and they may have some of that tribal knowledge or past experience and their organization doesn’t, isn’t prepared to fully backfill that immediately we can step in and provide a little bit of that subject matter expert background to help support the project. It’s really a little bit of a staff augmentation, planning as a service using the client’s information, in this case Continental Battery Systems information, and walk through the process just to make sure the biggest goal of business continuity takes place while we’re in process of doing a implementation or some kind of transformation project along the way.
Joe Davis (07:03):
So let me ask you this. Why GAINS, why did demand, inventory, and replenishment planning, the products that we offer, stand out versus other things that you had looked at, Jeremy? What must haves did it check for you guys?
Jeremy Kiel (07:17):
Yeah, so the initial driver of the interest in GAINS was past experience, right? So our chief supply chain officer in previous roles had been a part of implementing GAINS in other companies that he had worked for. One in particular, and he had a really good experience with the GAINS software and the people at GAINS in particular. We did go through what I would call an interview process, talked through with a couple of other companies, GAINS included, about their offering, what it would look like for implementation in our organization. Ultimately landed on GAINS because of the level of comfort that we had from past experience and just a base level understanding that the type of business that we’re running was very similar to businesses where our chief supply chain officer had implemented GAINS and had success and felt like the crossover there worked very well for what we do. And so that’s ultimately what drove us to GAINS and getting the process started.
Joe Davis (08:32):
And you guys chose to go with a two phase rollout, if I’m remembering this correctly, you started with demand planning and then moved to inventory and replenishment, is that right?
Jeremy Kiel (08:43):
That is correct, yeah. So we had a global level project plan that incorporated our two needs, if you will, but the short term need was really needing to bridge the gap between where we were at today, which effectively was kind of dead in the water without any sort of formal demand plan capabilities. And ultimately where we wanted to get to as an organization, which was a fully fledged demand planning software that’s running both internal and external replenishment as well as a team of people to be able to utilize the software and maximize its capabilities, neither of which we had. And we knew that the runway that we needed to get to that point was quite a bit longer than our existing challenges and needed a phase one to kind of get us situated so that the business could continue to function on some level. And that’s really where the partnership with enVista and GAINS came in at the onset.
Joe Davis (09:54):
Well, let me ask you guys about that, Willis and Bobby, when you break it out like that, what were the decisions to sequence things out like that? And is that typical? Is that something you see with some regularity?
Willis Wendell (10:05):
Yeah, I can jump in on that. So absolutely. We basically look at transformations as an incremental multi-phase process. And in this case we stood up that demand planning and inventory in a very short timeframe. And planning as a service was essentially right there to be initiated right along with that initial go live. And part of it being the nature of the project, kind of slightly under duress, rapid implementation because the system that they had was failing them, meant we were kind of ascertaining their requirements as we went along and learning a lot in a very short timeframe. So yeah, I mean really we wanted it, it sounded simple, right? Let’s drop in GAINS and replace what’s there and keep all the piping the same in terms of integration and so forth. Well, you know you learn as you go and we adapted and enVista and GAINS we were able to go in and essentially modify this planning as a service and the various activities on more of an as needed basis.
Joe Davis (11:21):
So Bobby, let me ask you, when you’re setting up this planning as a service, you’re going through the implementation, how do you decide between forecast, data visualization, report customization, what falls on your team and what falls on the Continental Battery team?
Bobby Hathaway (11:37):
Yeah, I think that’s a great question and really to echo Willis’ comments there and Jeremy’s as well, the speed to continuity or speed to value as part of this partnership is really the benefit there. And how we do that per your question is really the benefit that everybody gets out of this. In this particular case, the benefit of the partnership is GAINS can really focus on the technical aspect of getting everything up and running quickly. And that’s very important. It takes a lot of immediate focus to do that, and our part of the enVista focus is actually coming in to kind of help manage the process to your question of what do we do with that and what does the business handle versus what do we handle? A lot of it is we just step in immediately. Our staff will come in to actually help with the overall processing of information.
Bobby Hathaway (12:23):
In this particular case, we did some of the historical analysis, reviewing some of that, reviewing the forecasts forecast, making sure they’re getting processed, and even as we were moving forward as part of the transformation process, provide a little bit of the training for the internal CBS team on how to use GAINS and overall demand planning best practices. So there was a little bit of co-working on deciding who was going to handle what. I think our staff ended up stepping in immediately and kind of handling any of the day-to-day quick type decisions and processing, and slowly transitioned those over to the CBS team as the staff was actually organized. And Jeremy kind of alluded to, they built a staff part of this organization moving forward coinciding with the overall implementation of the planning tool.
Joe Davis (13:13):
Yeah, I’ve heard in talking with other customers of ours, one of the things that stands out with GAINS, and if we want to toot our own horn here for a second, why not, right? But just the partnership aspect, it’s not a turnkey solution. It’s not like, here’s your black box, good luck, call us if anything breaks. And I think that I really like that about GAINS. I think that’s one way that I have heard that we stand out and certainly I feel the same way
Jeremy Kiel (13:40):
A hundred percent. I was really the individual in our company that was leading the charge in terms of the boots on the ground implementation activity. And Willis can attest to this, but I would imagine without knowing for sure, but my guess would be that our implementation probably required a bit more TLC than most in that we were a company that was put together through acquisition in at a fairly rapid pace and some of the challenges that we were dealing with from a data perspective in particular, that resulted from the quick nature in which our company came together and made things a little bit challenging out of the gate. But we had multiple resources from the GAINS teams specifically that helped walk us through those challenges and help us understand the things that were going to be really important to us from a data perspective as we move forward in having the flexibility to work with, in some cases what was fairly limited resources and knowledge and understanding about even what was being represented in our own database, including a lot of validation of data to make sure that what was coming into GAINS ultimately was accurate in what we would expect to see.
Joe Davis (15:19):
That sounds overwhelming. I mean wading through what I’m sure is for you, enormous amount of data and worrying about data health. I mean, was that at all a stumbling block for you when you were sitting down thinking about starting this project? Just the overwhelming nature of the information you had and would have to deal with?
Jeremy Kiel (15:41):
Yeah, in terms of my lack of experience in understanding how to navigate very large databases. And that’s really where I spent a lot of time with Willis and Parth in particular, really getting in the weeds with our data. Not only the setup of getting the data moving back and forth between the two systems, but understanding what we were passing to GAINS, what GAINS needed to see. And then ultimately looking at tons and tons and tons of examples of instances where, hey, this looks right and this doesn’t. And the ability to be able to isolate potential issues in the data is a skill that I most definitely did not possess. But Willis and Parth having been through lots of implementations with GAINS, we’re able to craft queries and things that would help us get to the stuff that really matters in terms of data validation to make sure that what was coming into the system was accurate. Definitely would not have been able to do most of that on my own. That is for sure.
Joe Davis (16:57):
Right. Well, I want to talk about something that Bobby touched on earlier where we talk about speed. Before Continental Battery went live, your inventory sharing and visibility methods were manual, right? But then post-implementation changed was sort of you were able to get to information faster and change who could see what? How did that help you? How has that helped your business? What’s changed after that transition?
Jeremy Kiel (17:28):
Yes, there’s a lot to unpack there. I think some of the primary challenges that we are experiencing as a company, first and foremost, we sell automotive and commercial batteries. We’re a wholesale distributor primarily. So we don’t manufacture anything. Everything that we buy, everything that we sell is purchased from a supplier, some of which have relatively short lead times in our world, which would be three, four weeks. Others are five months away. And the unique challenge that exists in batteries, which is not unique to stuff that comes from international suppliers in a lot of cases is it has a shelf life. So if you let a battery sit for some period of time after it’s been fully formed and charged and activated, the battery will discharge.
Jeremy Kiel (18:24):
It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad and can’t be sold, but it has to be maintained before you can sell it to a customer in order for it to work when they put it in the application. And so there are some inherent challenges that exist around making sure that you have the appropriate amount of inventory to service your customer base without having too much, not only because of the working capital challenges that that represents, but also just the integrity of the inventory that you have on hand. And the methodology that we utilized as a company to quote unquote move inventory around our network was really kind of rudimentary where we had forecasts for items and we knew at any given point in time what we had on hand and on order. The visibility that GAINS brought into our world that we didn’t quite have previously was the notion of a time phased replenishment and what that looks like and visibility to our pipeline at the SKUL level and item at a location
Jeremy Kiel (19:30):
Where we can see you may have enough on hand and on order to cover a lead time and whatever safety stock that you want to keep on hand, but if the majority of what you have on order is not landing four months from now and you have a month worth of inventory on hand, that’s a problem. And that was the visibility that we were really lacking at a global level, that GAINS immediately opened our eyes. And so we were able to utilize some reporting that Willis and the enVista team helped us with to quickly identify opportunities to move product around the network, both stuff that we had in an excess position. Also, stuff where we had a need that we could service our need using existing inventory rather than waiting for a purchase order from a supplier. And that activity was really unique to us and wasn’t something that we had really had great visibility to previously.
Joe Davis (20:34):
And that brings us to the end of the first half of our conversation. A big thanks to Jeremy Kiel, Bobby Hathaway and Willis Wendell for taking us inside the moment when Continental Battery Systems had to rebuild demand planning from the ground up, and the rapid collaboration that made it possible. In part two, we’ll dig into how CBS sharpened forecast accuracy, strengthened replenishment policy, improve visibility across a fast moving network, and build the internal capability to run planning with confidence. You’ll also hear how GAINS and enVista partner to clean data at scale and uncover opportunities that simply weren’t visible before. If you’re interested in elevating your own planning processes, visit GAINSystems.com to learn more. And if you’re enjoying this conversation, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on part two. So keep learning, keep optimizing, and remember in the rollercoaster world of supply chain, we’re all in this together.
Joe Davis (21:29):
This is Joe Davis signing off from GAINS On. Until next time. Want to stay connected with all things GAINS and continue to explore the exhilarating world of supply chain planning and design? Then don’t forget to follow GAINS on LinkedIn where you can be part of our growing and vibrant professional community. And for more content, engaging posts and updates, don’t forget to like and subscribe to GAINS On on YouTube. Trust us, you won’t want to miss what we’re sharing. If today’s podcast episode left you hungry for even more insights we’ve gotten you covered. Every episode of GAINS On is accompanied by a detailed blog post for those who wish to dive deeper into the topic. Whether you’re looking to expand your knowledge or find that special morsel of information, our blogs are designed with you in mind. Visit gainsystems.com for more. All the links you need to be found at the description below. Thanks once again for tuning into GAINS On. And remember, we are here to help you to code the world of supply chains, one episode at a time.
