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There are moments when someone outside your organization articulates something you’ve been observing inside it for years. That’s how we felt reading Knut Alicke’s recent Substack, “The Planner Was the System.”
We encourage everyone in the SC community to read it. It honestly diagnoses a structural problem that the supply chain industry has been quietly working around for thirty years.
In Plain Terms
Alicke’s point is simple. Supply chain planning systems have always been strong at modeling structure: networks, parameters, lead times, inventory policies, and the mathematical relationships between them. What they have never modeled well is reality. Because of that gap, planners have effectively served as the primary reasoning layer in most planning environments.
The system generates signals. The planner decides which are real. How suppliers actually perform, how forecasts get distorted, how organizations respond to pressure, and what experienced planners know from years of pattern recognition that no system ever captured.
The system knows the structure, but the planner knows the reality.
We’ve Watched This Play Out
GAINS has seen this dynamic in many of the customer environments we’ve entered.
- Products are moving through the network.
- The planning software is functioning.
- Exceptions are firing.
- Recommendations are being generated.
And then a senior planner, someone who may have survived two or three acquisitions and been on the team long enough to remember why certain policies exist, quietly adjusts a significant portion of the system’s output. Not because it is wrong, but because they know things the system doesn’t.
At Border States, a deeply experienced planning team had developed extraordinary instincts for inventory positioning across its large, complex distribution network. Their intention wasn’t to replace what they knew, but to build systems capable of running that reasoning consistently at a scale and speed no individual could sustain alone. Within three months, 90 percent of purchase order decisions were made automatically, with service levels rising.
At Continental Battery Systems, years of acquisition had created a fragmented planning environment, heavily reliant on institutional knowledge concentrated in just a few people. By building a unified planning architecture across its more than 150 locations, GAINS helped encode its distributed expertise into a system to apply it everywhere, consistently. Inventory dropped 40 percent. Fill rates for A and B items moved from the 60s into the high 80s and low 90s.
In both cases, the breakthrough was capturing and scaling the judgment that the best planners had been applying manually, making it independent of any individual’s presence on the team.
Where the Work Gets Harder
Alicke frames AI as an opportunity to capture what he calls “experiential ontology” – the persistent knowledge layer that reflects how the supply chain actually behaves, not just how it’s modeled.
The companies successfully reducing reliance on “planner heroics” (institutional knowledge, manual intervention, and overtime) begin with building a strong foundation: clean data, integrated systems, and planning logic that lives in the system rather than in someone’s head. Not an AI platform.
Automation layered on a broken infrastructure only produces better-looking problems, not solutions. The goal isn’t smarter dashboards or another tool for overworked planners to manage alongside everything else. It’s creating a SC planning environment where routine decisions run themselves and the judgment of your best people developed over years gets encoded into the system, runs every day, and never retires.
This work is harder than it sounds and nearly impossible to do in isolation. That’s the shift we’re working toward with customers, building a long-term partnership, not a deployment event.
Why This Matters Right Now
The reason this article caught our attention is that the pressure on the workforce is real and getting worse. Experienced planners are retiring. Their institutional knowledge isn’t being captured at anything close to the rate it’s leaving. And the supply chains they’ve been holding together through expertise and hard work are getting more complex.
Organizations that haven’t yet begun building systems capable of capturing and systematizing that reasoning are running out of time. It’s a risk most supply chain leaders don’t realize until it’s already happened.
That’s the core of what Alicke is warning about. We think he’s right. And we think the supply chain community would benefit from taking it seriously.
Read the essay: “The Planner Was the System” by Knut Alicke →
If it resonates with what you’re seeing in your own organization, we’d welcome the conversation.
Send this to your favorite AI and keep the conversation going.
