GAINS On Podcast Ep 11: Supply Chain Innovation

Joe Davis:

Hello again supply chain aficionados, business innovators and tech enthusiasts. Welcome back to GAINS On, the podcast that unravels the complexity of supply chain management with a touch of charm, and a heap of expertise. I’m your friendly neighborhood podcast host Joe Davis, ready to guide you through another enlightening episode. Today we’re joined again by the insightful Amber Salley, Vice President of Industry Solutions at GAINS, and Paul Baris, Vice President of Planning Strategy from EnVista. We’ll discuss strategies and technologies to enhance supply chain efficiency and responsiveness. From identifying quick wins to implementing cutting edge technologies, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you navigate and optimize your supply chain. So sit back, relax, and let’s dive into the world a supply chain innovation.

 

So what strategies or technologies to GAINS in EnVista implement to enhance the supply chain efficiency and responsiveness? I know you’d mentioned that EnVista, and I know GAINS does as well, takes a best practices approach. One, because they’re proven, right? We’ve seen other people do it, we know that success, but what sort of things do we, you’re meeting somebody in an advisory capacity, they sit down with you and they say, Paul, Amber, you know what? My supply chain’s a bit of a mess. I don’t even know where to start. We want to bring in technology. Where do you begin?

Paul Baris:

Yeah, well, I think the first thing is we listen very well, right? We listen and we take a data-driven approach. So I think it was Gartner that calls EnVista the MIT of supply chain because many of us are engineers, and so we really take a data-driven engineering design approach to that and we listen for the symptoms of the problems, and then we try to probe and either through data or through interviews or through observation, identify the root causes of those problems. Because really what it comes down to is the root cause of those problems. So we go into, I’ll say many clients and someone like me that’s been doing this for 35 years can sit there and say, well, they need a planning system, but we can’t start with the planning system. That’s not step one. Sometimes companies want to go to just immediately go to a technological solution, which sometimes you have to be careful with that because the worst thing you want to have happen is a failed implementation.

Paul:

So our approach, our approach is really trying to be that voice of reason with the client to make sure that they are taking that thoughtful, strategic progression of how they move from step one to step 10. But EnVista, we can obviously do planning systems, we do network modeling, so we can help design that and we call it strategic network modeling. We do inventory policy reviews. We can do warehouse designs, warehouse racking automation. We implement WMS systems. I think we can implement the big three WMS systems and then we’re a D 365 implementation house. So the point being is we’re unique in the fact that our consulting practice sits separately from the technology implementation side in most cases, right? Because we want to stay as agnostic as possible when we’re designing a solution. Now, my planning team does do the implementations, but only because at this point in time we we’re growing and evolving and developing, and we believe there’s, planning is different than WMS or then finance as an example. The math checks, debits and credits check. You can do that planning. There’s a lot of judgment that comes into play of what is the right parameter that you’re inputting. And so there’s some trial and error, but so we try to really be that trusted advisor for a client so that we can give them the right solution for their business.

Joe:

I know from my experience that I’m sure yours as well that it’s so easy to fall back on old habits, good or bad, because they’re what we’ve always done. So once we get all the things in place, we decided this is the best option for us. Got everybody excited, what do we do next?

Paul:

So one of the things that we do, so first off, we talk about quick wins. So we very often will do some, I’ll say database or Excel modeling to identify those quick wins and we demonstrate here’s what’s possible and let’s go target 50 SKUs. We’re going to go target and we’re going to work on them. We’re going to be successful to show them that the math and the methodology works. You start with the why are we doing this? Why is it important to the company? And then how, how does GAINS help us meet the why? And then we have to, I think one of the challenges a lot of companies have is they don’t put a change management program in place. So we want to basically put that change management program in place and with metrics and with reinforcements and senior leadership support so that there’s all of these little things that are all adding to that drive and the desire to just keep going. And then you take the little wins, you celebrate the little wins, and then again, it becomes cascading and you build the momentum where then the people start asking forward and they start pulling forward. I mean, the best implementations are is when the functional team starts telling the technical team go faster.

Speaker 1:

I tell you, I’ve run into it, I’ve seen it in organizations too that change, positive change and positive improvements are addictive. Once you realize that things can be better than they are, you want other things to get better too.

Amber Salley:

Yeah, and so two things that come to mind. One is in addition to organizations not placing enough emphasis on change management, I don’t think they also place enough emphasis on the behaviors that drive the actual actions of the people.

 

Paul:

Exactly

 

Amber:

If your planners were measured on some kind of metric and you continue to have them measured on that metric, then they might be more likely to revert back to how they did things because they still think, I got to make sure that I meet that metric. But if you, what I see a lot of companies do is maybe for demand planners. Demand planners had been measured on the overall forecast accuracy of their portfolio of products

Paul:

Way up here

Amber:

Yeah. Now you start to get them measured against perfect order or measured against some other higher level costs so that they can start to see how the tool that they’re using is helping to drive improvement in that higher order metric. And that may be something that you have to do with HR or some other group, but start to think of what are the behaviors we actually want our planners start to exhibit once we get this technology in place. The other thing that I don’t know if a lot of companies do this because I haven’t been a consultant in some time, but actually thinking of creating an application management structure where you would have your demand side users, which actually be the planners and the buyers, your supply side users, which would be IT, data scientists, modelers, and then your PMO enterprise architect or some other entity that is aligning the supply chain planning tool into the broader IT landscape.

Amber:

And that can help to ensure that the tool is becoming more advanced and enriched over time. And you’re also getting the voice of the users of what they need in the tool, maybe what could be deprioritized for the development of the tool. What you don’t want is you built this tool, you had some change management, you had a team that was championing it, and then that champion, championing team moves on to another project and then there’s no one there to champion the whole initiative. And then people revert back. At my time at my previous company, I talked to a couple of companies where they had been using a supply chain supply technology tool for a couple of years, and then the team that was the center of excellence moved on to a new role. And whenever in that group moved on to start something new, then there was no one to ensure that the process was being matured, that the tool was being used as it was designed to be used. And then you reverted back to.

Paul:

That’s a great point because that’s governing structure, if you will, to ensure continuity beyond the people. You need that structural component, not just a single person. It’s got to be a process as opposed to just a person. There is a multi-billion dollar company that we did some work for during COVID where we literally walked in and they had a tier one planning tool sitting on the shelves, right?

 

Joe:

Oh no.

 

Paul:

Because the people that were the experts in it left the company and they didn’t do a good job of making sure that there was cross training and that there was a succession plan. And so they literally, during the most important time from supply chain planning, they didn’t have an exceptional tool available to them to use.

Joe:

So looking beyond 2024, what are some key trends or innovations in supply chain management that GAINS in EnVista are particularly well positioned to leverage?

Amber:

A few things that come to mind. One is composability, and having environments that are deliberately structured to a allow end users to quickly compose, recompose workflows, or decision flow processes to support rapidly changing environments. So that’s something that is going to impact every technology type for supply chain because we’ve seen some vendors in the space move forward and invest a lot in creating these types of approaches. I think over time, all of vendors are going to have to get along and follow that lead. Another saying is the connectivity we had mentioned talk about earlier, the connectivity between suppliers and their customers and having more visibility between those groups. And this idea of having the technology be that conduit for that conversation is going to again, become more and more important. So at GAINS, we recently released our product called GAINS Connect, which is an easy way for our customers to connect with other source systems, both internal organization and outside of their organization, so that can more easily bring in those signals into the GAINS platform to make better decisions for supply chain. And the last thing is at GAINS, we talk about decision engineering and focusing on the anatomy of the decision. And decisions have been talked about forever in supply chains, but what we have seen a lot of providers talk about is making decisions faster, which is okay, but how do you know that you’ve made the best decision that you could make given all the information available to you? And in what we see of the evolution of data science, decision science, distributed systems, operations, research, all coming together to help with improving high quality decisions, this idea of decision engineering in beyond 2024 is going to become talked about a lot in supply chains.

Paul:

I totally agree when Amber was talking about sort of the composability, if you will, because really these are business problems that are being solved as opposed to functional tasks. So part of the challenge of a lot of software tools, and not just in planning space, but in many spaces, is they focus on a task as opposed to what’s the workflow? So we need to think about it from a workflow, and companies need to be able to sit there and take these pieces and put ’em together so they can create their own workflow and some of those things. So I think that’s really, really important. And I think, again, since enVista we think about that end-to-end workflow. I mean, I think it just fits in very well within our sweet spot. The other thing, I’m a little bit of an operations research geek from way back when, but the whole probabilistic planning I think is huge. I mean, again, being a practitioner for 30 years, the whole concept of a point-based forecast is just, it’s ridiculous. I wish I could blow it up, but because it really, whether it’s 13, 14, or 12 does not matter. What matters is it’s within some range that the organization of the supply chain can react to and that the finance team can plan and react to. So that range based planning, not just on the demand side, but also on the supply side, so that you need to be able to, we think about order points as being a fixed number and we think about replenishment quantities. But again, if you’ve got a choice of, well, I ordered 48, well, but it comes in a pallet of 50. We do things like a pallet multiple, so we round up, but what if I could put a hundred on and save on my freight side?

So more of this range based planning that’s sort of only baked into the process from start to finish, I think is going to be huge. And then I’m a big believer in, as I mentioned earlier, of stochastics, which is really simulation based as opposed to deterministic. And that is huge, right? I mean, I was doing stochastic simulation in grad school 30, 40 years ago now, right? Almost. And the power that you could see there with, again, and especially when we talk about scenarios, there’s a number of different outcomes that can happen in these scenarios, and that’s where stochastics can come into play because now it can model all these range. And we’ve seen examples in some research papers where a, especially in network modeling, where a strictly deterministic approach gives one answer, but then when you do a simulation for all the possible outcomes, you get something that’s very, very different that is not that far from a cost perspective than the quote unquote linear programming optimal solution. Yet it can handle such a larger range of variability. And that’s what we need to do to be able to design agility in supply chains, is we need to be able to handle this variety of outcomes.

Joe:

Well, you’ve given us a lot to think about, and I want to thank you Paul and Amber, for coming on the show today and talking about what culture change and how that’s such a big part of it, but you know culture wasn’t created in a day. We’re not likely to change it in a day either and bringing in new technologies and really just learn to embrace and make those technologies ours. This is an effective way to really start to weather the storms that come.

 

Paul:
I appreciate the opportunity. It’s always a pleasure. Amber, thank you.

 

Joe:

Yes, thank you guys so much for coming on the show. We look forward to having you back on. Take care. And just like that, we’ve reached the end of another fascinating episode of GAINS On. A heartfelt thank you to Amber Salley and Paul Baris for the invaluable insights on enhancing supply chain efficiency and responsiveness. We hope you found today’s discussion both enlightening and practical. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, stay connected with us on social media for more updates and insights. Remember, in the fast evolving landscape of supply chain management, planning and design, we’re all in this together. Until next time, keep learning, keep innovating, and keep on gaining with GAINS On. I’m Joe Davis signing off. See you next episode.

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