By Amber Salley
As always, Gartner’s Supply Chain Planning Summit is an excellent showcase for the growing innovation in planning. It’s also a chance to interact with some of the brightest minds in Supply Chain Planning (SCP). This year in Denver, Summit was also personal; 2024 marked my professional homecoming— a return to Gartner, where I’d spent 12 years as a research analyst. This year I would have a chance to see how far the industry had come since becoming GAINS’s Vice President of Industry Solutions. The conversations I had both as an attendee and a presenter highlighted our progress and reinforced the importance of focusing on practical solutions that make an impact. I left the summit inspired by the discussions and more confident than ever in the critical role of GAINS in shaping the future of planning.
AI in Supply Chain Planning: Turning Vision into Reality
A dominant theme of the conference was AI and machine learning (ML). “Leveraging AI/ML in Supply Chain Planning,” Joe Graham’s session, underscored a Gartner survey revealing that over 75% of organizations are actively deploying or experimenting with AI in their SCP processes. Graham introduced a five-step framework for successfully implementing AI—identifying use cases, building internal skills, gathering data, selecting techniques, and scaling. While this roadmap provides valuable structure, for some organizations, it may feel like a monumental task. That’s where GAINS comes in. We’ve streamlined the process with prebuilt AI solutions like machine learning-based lead-time prediction, enabling businesses to skip the complexity and unlock value faster.
By partnering with a provider like GAINS, companies can bypass many of the challenges associated with building internal AI capabilities. We’ve already identified common use cases and developed models, and we can help customers source data, train the models, and maintain them to avoid model drift. This approach accelerates time-to-value and reduces the need for companies to invest heavily in internal resources to achieve aspirational goals, like improving decision quality and planner productivity.
Joe’s presentation also included an example strikingly similar to our collaboration with Border States Electric. While he didn’t explicitly name Border States, the story appeared to align closely with our joint effort to develop ML-driven lead-time predictions. This partnership helped Border States navigate significant supply chain variability, align inventory and procurement functions, and improve working capital. If this was indeed a reference to Border States, it underscores the transformative value GAINS delivers to its customers.
Decision Intelligence: Empowering Planners to Think Strategically
Leonard Ammerer’s presentation on decision intelligence emphasized a critical gap in today’s SCP processes: while most organizations have ample data, they struggle to translate it into actionable decisions. In fact, 65% of organizations use data primarily to justify decisions that have already been made.
As Ammerer highlighted, true data-driven decision-making requires ecosystems that connect and contextualize decisions. At GAINS, we call this approach “decision engineering.” Our framework integrates real-time data across supply chain nodes, enabling businesses to model, test, and execute decisions that maximize value.
Decision modeling is central to this effort. Decision models elevate planners into strategic decision-makers by mapping cause-and-effect relationships across the supply chain. With GAINS’ advanced modeling tools, planners can simulate disruptions, quantify risks, and align their decisions with broader organizational objectives. These tools enable a shift from hypothesis-driven processes to data-led insights.
From Range-Based to Probabilistic Planning: A Roadmap for Resilience
Sue Grant’s session on range-based planning highlighted the limitations of deterministic, single-number forecasts and emphasized the need for businesses to adopt a more dynamic approach to managing uncertainty. Range-based planning involves defining upper and lower limits for key metrics, providing a foundation for making decisions within a spectrum of possibilities rather than relying on a fixed outcome. This approach is a critical first step toward more advanced probabilistic planning.
While range-based planning is an important progression, the tools we are building at GAINS enable companies to go much further. By integrating advanced techniques like stochastic optimization, scenario-based modeling, and discrete-event simulation, businesses can move beyond basic ranges to embrace true variability and uncertainty in their planning processes. These methods allow a deeper understanding of how supply chains perform under different conditions, empowering companies to stress-test their networks and refine their designs for greater resilience and adaptability.
For example:
- Stochastic Optimization helps organizations factor randomness and variability directly into their decision-making, providing a robust framework for balancing risk and performance.
- Scenario-Based Modeling evaluates multiple potential outcomes to prepare for a range of future possibilities, enabling proactive responses to volatility.
- Discrete-Event Simulation allows companies to model and test supply chain processes with high fidelity, uncovering hidden inefficiencies and testing policy changes.
At GAINS, we enable organizations to take these techniques out of theoretical realms and into practical, day-to-day operations. By moving beyond range-based planning into probabilistic and experimental approaches, businesses can transform their supply chains from reactive systems into value-generating assets.
Aspirational Visions Come to Life with Executive Stories
One of the most compelling parts of the Summit was hearing how leading organizations, particularly AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), turned their ambitious supply chain visions into reality through innovation and forward-thinking strategies.
AstraZeneca shared their journey toward a self-healing supply chain—a concept that once seemed like science fiction. By leveraging heterogeneous technology ecosystems and balancing investments in high-impact, low-cost solutions, and larger strategic platforms, AstraZeneca has built a supply chain capable of adapting autonomously to disruptions.
Conversely, BMS showcased its approach to aligning strategic, tactical, and operational decision-making through long-term capacity planning. They demonstrated how to manage uncertainty across time horizons using advanced simulation, Monte Carlo techniques, and optimization. This alignment ensures their supply chain can both anticipate and react to variability in demand, costs, and supply.
Fifteen to twenty years ago, these capabilities would have been unimaginable. Today, thanks to advancements in technology and the rise of composable solutions, they are not only possible but practical. GAINS is proud to be at the forefront of this revolution, enabling companies to adopt these strategies and achieve what once seemed impossible.
Digital transformation is no longer just a buzzword; it’s the foundation of modern SCP. By adopting a forward-thinking technology strategy, organizations can unlock new levels of agility, resilience, and efficiency.
GAINS: Enabling the Aspirational Future
Leaving the Gartner Summit, I am more confident than ever that the aspirations shared at the event are not just dreams—they’re tangible realities that GAINS is uniquely equipped to deliver. From probabilistic planning to decision intelligence and AI/ML-driven innovations, we are at the forefront of this transformation.
By embracing a composable, customer-centric approach, we ensure that companies not only keep pace with change but lead the way.