GAINS On Podcast S2 Ep.9: Supply Chain Composability in Action with Nucleus Research

Joe (00:01):
Welcome back, business buffs, supply chain strategists and tech aficionados. Joe Davis here, your Friendly Neighborhood podcast host with another enthralling episode of GAINS On. Your guide for making sense of modern supply chain strategy, planning and design, powered as always, by the brilliant minds of GAINS. If you caught our last episode, you already know we’ve been breaking down the real meaning of composability with GAINS’s own Amber Salley and Charles Brennan from Nucleus Research. Today we’re picking up right where we left off, but shifting gears into the how. How does Composability help you move faster? How does AI support planners without replacing them. And how can modular flexible tools actually empower teams instead of overwhelming? If you’re looking to cut through the hype and get to the heart of practical supply chain transformation, you’re in the right place. Amber, Charles, let’s dive back in. Amber, you talk about how do you get people to shift their mindset from a rip and replace mindset for I need a new solution, I need to take everything out and bring something else in with this huge huge digital transformation, how do you get them to switch from rip and replace to the idea of incremental improvement is the right way to go?

Amber (01:16):
That’s part of the challenge because for so many years the idea has been you want to have a more homogenous technology environment with one of the ideas being that if you have too many providers as supporting the business, you have to deal with complexity of interfacing and integrations. And if you just have one solution in place it there might be a lot of pain in getting the technology actually stood up, but the theory is that at the end of the day, it’ll just be much easier to maintain. And you’ve heard of that saying you have one throat to choke, right?

Joe (02:08):
Right.

Amber (02:09):
So I’ll, a lot of those feelings are still persistent in organizations, so getting companies to holistically to think about moving away from these large big bang investments into the composable way of managing their technology stack is very, very hard. Now, ways that companies can start to think about getting the rest of the organization to see the benefit of moving towards composability is one of the nice things about composability and these individual services is that they can be self-funded. A business unit or a team that has some discretionary funds that they can use for whatever purpose could use those funds to invest in a service that they can have built into their technology environment and hopefully start to see those incremental improvements very quickly. And then we can start to showcase to other stakeholders in the enterprise that, look, we took this approach of investing in this software vendor that has a visibility approach.

(03:34):
We used this one service, we were able to fund it ourselves, little support from our internal IT, and very quickly we were able to see great improvements and we actually don’t have the friction that we thought we might have with the interfacing and integration because the vendor has a moderate API-first approach that is purposefully designed to reduce all of that friction. So it’s more, I see it’s going to be more of instances like that where organizations or business units demonstrating how composability is a way to, well some of the fears that might be had in organizations today.

Joe (04:22):
Well, we’re talking about that with this faster time to value that Nucleus uncovered in their report, how GAINS is able to get faster time to value through the modular implementations, download the report available on gainsystems.com. I guess, does that help play a role in adoption of the solution? I mean, because you’re not having to learn a whole new start from square one in terms of learning a new system?

Charles (04:47):
Yeah, it’s my perspective, it’s critical and this approach that GAINS allows customers to use it. Really, you introduce new functionality without having to ask for a full IT budget cycle. This lift allows it to make it much easier for teams to get things moving and really faster time to value means better operational benefits to your company. And the organization I had a conversation with, they flat out told me they didn’t need to involve IT at all that much, that kind of level of autonomy lets operations move that much faster, focus on solving those real problems that I mentioned without really having to deal with this usual bureaucratic drag and these long IT discussions. And that’s how you get that true incremental value that Amber discussed. So that’s my biggest thing, right? It’s faster time to value focus on those operations, less on the technology that could be dragging you down.

Joe (05:41):
Well, as far as, let me ask you that to follow up on that, what did your research reveal about the speed of GAINS implementations compared to other folks in the industry?

Charles (05:50):
Sure, sure. That’s a great question. When you think about generally in the market, you have to take a step back. Typically for supply chain planning, it’s very common for organizations to deal with these long 12 month deployments. They’re still too common, I have to say, and from my conversations, GAINS customers are often realizing value in weeks, and I think the architecture makes it possible, right? If you’re not deploying these huge rigid monolithic systems as mentioned and really kind of defining those use cases that these composable systems allow you to address. We’re really not trying to boil the ocean on day one here. We’re really about that incremental value, and I think GAINS has really allowed customers to solve that critical problem fast and then ultimately allow them to scale from there right? is kind of getting those things iron solid. But from my experience, like I said, implementations are very, very long in the supply chain planning field. If you’re able to minimize that by half at least, and in my instances GAINS customers have done that faster than that, but faster time to value is the big thing there, right? What’s the operational financial value of getting these solutions up faster? And that’s a big one there.

Joe (07:02):
Talking about moving faster and making better decisions, which is sort of a tenant of what GAINS does. We have heard a lot about artificial intelligence and I know that it’s sort of become like wallpaper, it’s everywhere. I heard recently that there was a vacuum cleaner manufacturer who wanted to get AI into their vacuum cleaners and sort of people are now starting to suffer from AI fatigue. But what I want to discuss is I know that GAINS has been a part of the AI revolution evolution, I guess I should say for a while. And I know you both separately have highlighted the importance of AI and its role in modern supply chains. But I guess my question is how does GAINS leverage AI differently to support better, faster decision making?

Charles (07:48):
I’d say I can state something real quick then Amber if you want to back that up there. And I think the biggest thing there is, again, how you guys differentiate yourself is how it’s embedded directly into the decision workflows. It’s not some sort of separate data science initiative or something you have to train your models in house. You think about that demand prediction tool, a really great example. It’s that real world delivery data to improve accuracy without needing IT to stand up or create a model. The AI is really context to where it’s built just for that. It’s really the drive, the playing decision. It’s not just some dashboard that you create. The focus on decision support instead of analytics just for really analytics sake is what I’ve seen set them apart from that perspective.

Amber (08:35):
And I want to focus in on what Charles said about the AI being embedded into the workflow, into the product feature itself. One thing that differentiates vendors from each other in their approach to AI is how they are applying the AI within their products and workflows to support an objective for an organization. For instance, there might be some vendors that focus on specific industry verticals where there is a lot of expiration and fast moving product. So their AI models will focus on products that have characteristics like that. Our AI tools have a lot of focus on items that have long lead types. So companies that have to manage material and product that they are sourcing from a locale that’s very far away and have to manage long lead times and long variability would maybe get more value out of the way that we apply AI into our technology because it’s purpose-built to support companies like that.

(10:07):
I’m not saying that with the first example, those companies with fast moving goods couldn’t get value out of using GAINS because we do have capabilities that can support companies like that. But as you think of how these different services across the market can help you, what thing you do want to get an eye for is what was the use of the AI built for, right? We don’t at GAINS look at AI for the sake of AI. Again, we look at the case of what decisions are we trying to help companies make and how can we take this AI, create a service for it to solve some of those specific needs.

Joe (10:50):
Not to get over my skis here, but I understand that GAINS leverages agentic AI or AI agents in the GAINS or decision engineering and optimization platform, the DEO platform and that use that to sense, adapt and act autonomously as I understand it. Is that accurate?

Amber (11:11):
One thing I want to make clear is that there are two different things. There’s AI agenics and agentic AI. Now AI Yes yes. So AI agents have been around for a while and these are things that they can take routine tasks. You give it maybe some rules to follow, maybe some autonomy, and it can make decisions based on those rules. Agentic AI is very, very new. So for the most part, if any vendor is out there saying they have agentic AI and have customers who are using agentic AI, I would be very skeptical of those claims because of how new things are right. And within GAINS, we are experimenting with agentic AI and one of the reasons why we see ourselves as a vendor that’s going to be able to provide more support for agentic AI than others is because of the composability vision that we have.

(12:11):
It’s going to be extremely hard for companies or for software vendors that are still in monolithic environments to actually deploy agentic AI environments or deploy them at scale. There is that need for having this services based component using large language models as part of that technology stack as well, that’s going to enable agentic AI to actually operate in an agentic AI manner. So within GAINS, as we’re building out our roadmap for AI, for helping improve outcomes, agentic AI is a big part of that, and we are doing experiments around, again, being output focused, purpose-driven, what can we design and develop that’s actually going to be beneficial to our customers?

Joe (13:09):
What does that look like in practice for a supply chain planner? I know that artificial intelligence is a big part of what we do for a long time, and as you pointed out, it’s embedded in services. We use machine learning and natural language processing to help build lead time prediction. What does that look like in the day-to-day?

Amber (13:27):
It’s going to change their roles. Investing in AI and deploying AI doesn’t mean that we are going to get rid of the planners. Right? It’s just going to really shift what the planner’s daily role entails and moving away from routine mundane tasks to tasks where they have to use more of their knowledge of the company, more of their knowledge of the market, more of their knowledge of supply chain, to identify where they might need to investigate some kind of disruption or work with the new product launch teams to help determine what the supply chain workflow should look like to support a new product launch. So a lot of things that companies have wanted to be able to do for some time, but just didn’t have the resource available to do because the folks who had knowledge to support some of the maybe teams outside of supply chain have just been tied to their daily roles and doing these tasks that in the future AI would be able to help them do.

Charles (14:50):
And I think the biggest thing that needs to, and it goes back to that education standpoint that I alluded to earlier about AI isn’t there to replace your job, it’s to make you more efficient. So really organizations got to reframe their view on that as saying, Hey, how can we make our existing workforce that much more important so that as we scale, we don’t necessarily need to onboard five new planners per se. So that’s the biggest thing, right? And right now it’s about redefining the roles. I think it’s how do you redeploy your technology staff as things evolve? The future of work isn’t fewer people, it’s about different roles that are thinking more ahead in the future as Amber discussed things that are more long-term and strategic that really will drive better business outcomes, increased revenue, stuff of that nature. And so that’s how I see it, right? It’s really redefining roles, not replacing them.

Joe (15:47):
So I want to dig a little further into the execution planning and strategy piece of it. I know in your report, Charles, you touched on how GAINS is able to enable better planning and execution alignment. So can you tell me a little bit more about that? What stood out to you about the way that GAINS connects those dots?

Charles (16:04):
Sure. So I think it’s more than just supporting strategy or execution or planning. It’s about bridging those two gaps. If you got something like a machine powered or machine learning powered lead time prediction tool that feeds directly into procurement and planning decisions that are flowing right into execution tools without needing manual reconciliation or just manual data transfer, that’s where a lot of these systems fail. They often allow organizations, or I won’t say allow organizations, they force ’em to really operate in those silos that we always discuss. And we think about supply chain, it’s a chain at the end of the day and one part of it affects another and vice versa. So it’s more about just connecting them. It’s about how these functions really operate and evolve together, which really drives business outcomes for me. So that’s the biggest thing is you get to look at your supply chain as a link and how these functions affect one another, and you need to partner with an organization that has the same mindset, but it really goes back to education and really uncovering who’s really doing it as compared to those that might just be talking about it in a marketing conversation or a marketing handbook per se.

(17:19):
So that’s the biggest thing for me. And what I’ve seen GAINS do a lot is right, you’re not really just supporting strategies. We’re bridging them together to drive better business outcomes, which is the most important. What can the customers do? Now, I’ll reiterate that a bunch, but in software and technology or any business in general, your customer fuels everything. And if they’re happy, if they’re doing more, that’s beneficial to all parties.

Joe (17:43):
I know that a lot of organizations operate in that siloed manner, and that’s something that we’re working to break down. But in your conversations, where do you see the most friction between strategic planning and operational execution, right? And is there a way that GAINS can help with that?

Charles (18:01):
Well, I think the biggest thing, right, is organizations look at them as separate functions. You have a different department focusing on each. So I think what GAINS does is kind of have that holistic view of how these work together and how planning affects execution, how execution might affect planning. So I think that’s the biggest thing is that kind of combined holistic view, which is super important. And I think organizations need to be aware of how they approach this, how these operations work in tandem with each other, and you need to partner with a vendor that has that same vision at the end of the day. So I think it’s kind of shifting that mindset of how it’s not just how you manage your planning or how you manage your transportation or your warehouse, it’s how you manage them as a one function, because each will affect another, and things always change. There could be a delay and products, for example, or there could be transportation delays, and that affects planning functions and effects execution function. So you really need to understand how that works altogether, and I think companies really need to reshape how they view that.

Joe (19:12):
Amber, in your conversations, have you seen that? Have you seen that their lack of adoption or friction between departments when it comes to instituting new solution like this?

Amber (19:22):
Yeah, that’s a big part of it that a lot of organizations have operated in silos. There’s also been the constraint around technology limitations, and that’s which I don’t know if it’s chicken or egg, between the siloed nature and the technology where their technology limitations of the past have made it very hard for a single instance to be able to support activities in the strategic time horizon, like network design with activities in the tactical time horizon, like your traditional supply chain planning activities with activities in the execution time horizon. And then also the fact that it had been very hard to share the decisions and rules and policies that had been established at each horizon with each other. And maybe you’d hear the adage of planning would throw something over to execution like it’s a brick wall, an execution would just ignore it and do whatever they’re going to do anyway, right?

(20:46):
Because there’d be no feedback loop mechanism. So yes, in my time prior to GAINS saw a ton of that. And with what we are doing with this vision for composability, if we were to think up every single technology vendor that supports supply chain being composable, then we would be able to connect all of these siloed parts together to be able to have a more common view of what’s occurring on the ground in the supply chain, what corporate leaders need or want for their future to support the needs of the stakeholders. And then have everything tie more closely together in the middle so that what’s executed on goes a long way to supporting those corporate goals. And chicken egg, again, that could be the key that removes those barriers and that friction.

Joe (21:54):
Well, let me ask you this question. So if I run the supply chain team and I have decided, you know what I do want to modernize, I do need to make changes. I do need to be ready for start future proofing my supply chain, what makes GAINS a good fit for a company that doesn’t have the luxury of long project timelines or massive IT budgets but still need to make these changes?

Amber (22:20):
So if we think of future proofing the supply chain and working with GAINS, a few things. One with the composable capabilities that we have, being able to identify which service is available that can add the most, add a lot of improvement in a very short period of time, quick wins, and then quick wins, yes, quick wins, and adding those services in succession to add on to all of those wins. And it’s because if we think about where value was generated and where value is lost, there’s a lot of value that’s generated in aligning that strategic and tactical time horizon we’re just talking about a little bit. There’s a lot of value lost in the tactical to operational time horizon where you’re doing a lot of firefighting, having a lot of headaches. So by engaging with GAINS, since we have a lot of capability to support and align that strategic and tactical time horizon, companies can future proof their supply chains by thinking a little bit more intelligently about how should I think about designing my network and using more accurate data around inventory and inventory positioning from that tactical time horizon so that you’re creating designs and creating TCO calculations and RI calculations and actually being able to achieve those whenever the new design goes into is completed and is operationalized.

(24:22):
Because when you created your design, you’re actually using more accurate information of what’s occurring in the tactical planning horizon, which is taking information from the executional time horizon. So you end up with just a better overall design and you also have a better idea of where you can flex in the different time horizons as this conditions change. So you become more futureproof because you are better able to build in the understand the risk and understand the uncertainty that could befall your supply chain so that if those do hit, you already know what you can do to manage around those disruptions that impact you.

Joe (25:17):
It seems to me if I am a supply chain leader and I don’t have a huge budget, I don’t have a huge ability to influence IT implementations, that type of thing, I want to use a solution like GAINS. It says that they’re there to democratize the supply chain. I use GAINS to, again, I analyze my supply chain, I look where I can find those quick wins, those small wins, and that build up over time. And is the idea that I then take those quick wins and show the value and to go make the case to leadership for more money or more institutional wide changes?

Charles (25:59):
From my perspective, that ROI message is the strongest, right? If organizations can really have that analysis of the value they’ve deployed from either a supply chain planning tool, they can bring that back to the executive board and say, Hey, look at the massive potential that we can achieve, right? We’ve already realized X, Y, and Z benefits, whether that’s reduced inventory, improved forecasting, whatever it may be, and what financial values that bring to companies, how does that help you reduce costs? How does that help you improve efficiency? And then a byproduct that both is how does that increased profitability? So if they’re able to prove that, bring that back to executives and say, wow, look at the value we’ve received from deploying GAINS for demand prediction, then they can say, Hey, listen, these organizations or the supply chain planning team, they’ve obviously have a good head on their shoulders and they’re going to make more advancements, so let’s fund them more. Let’s support them more. And I think that’s the biggest thing, right? If you’re able to solve these problems, you’re able to bring that back to your executive board and say, hey this is the value we’re realizing, that that goes a long way for all parties.

Joe (27:08):
If each of you had to give one piece of advice to a supply chain leader evaluating solutions here in 2025 with all the uncertainty and all the ambiguity that we’ve been facing, what would you tell them to look for in a solution?

Charles (27:23):
I’ll start here. And I’d say the biggest thing is that organizations really need to look at the market as saying, how can these solutions make us less dependent on an IT roadmap? If we need to go through a six month cycle just to change a forecasting method or to pull on a new data source, that’s a huge, huge red flag. And we think about it in 2025, these leaders, they don’t have the luxury of time and operations can’t afford to be handcuffed by these long approval periods or complex system upgrades that this take too long, too much money. And we think about composability, real composability is you’re not just having just microservices or APIs. It’s about allowing these businesses to really respond to these real world problems without waiting on IT to ultimately rewire everything at the end of the day. So when organizations are looking out into the market saying, how can we be more efficient?

(28:17):
The right solution is the one that really allows your planners and procurement teams to take action when things change because ultimately they will. We’ve seen it with tariffs. Think about COVID 19, this stuff comes out of nowhere. You need to be able to be agile without breaking the entire system or your entire budget. And that’s what future readiness looks like. How can your organization adopt new solutions faster? You need to partner with a vendor that’s thinking like that because at the end of the day, disruptions occur and you need to adjust ’em at the end of the day, from a very high level, they will continue to happen. They’ve happened for eternity and they will continue to happen. So that’s my biggest advice is how can you be less dependent on your IT team and be more focused on how we can improve operations with technology? Right because it’s just the foundation, it’s not going to change everything. It’s about the people there. It’s about what you do with it at the end of the day.

Joe (29:08):
Amber, what advice would you give?

Amber (29:09):
Embrace the notion of a heterogeneous technology deck. Now, we’ve been talking a lot about composability and have hopefully educated the audience on how to distinguish something that’s really composable to something that’s not. And we’ve also talked about how GAINS talks about no need to rip and replace, we can enter into any environment. The thing to consider though is that there are other supply chain vendors that do have a roadmap to becoming fully composable, which is great, but their messaging is also still very vendor centric. So as you look at composable solutions, think beyond just using the old method and engaging with just one vendor, even if they do have a fully composable stack, but embrace this idea that having multiple partners who all specialize in a specific need that you have is a better outcome for you than just thinking of moving just to composable maybe with just one vendor.

Charles (30:26):
A hundred percent. And it goes back to that building block method, right? And yeah, Amber mentioned that maybe you need to partner with someone for demand prediction or you need to partner with someone to make your warehouse execution more efficient. So I think you need to look at it like that and how you can plug and play these solutions to really be more efficient because disruptions will continue to happen. But yeah, I completely agree with you, Amber.

Joe (30:52):
So it really is that idea. There is no one right answer. There is no one perfect solution.

Charles (30:56):
No, no, no. There never is. Every organization’s different, but they need to look at it and say, what can we do to really be more efficient in how we do things? And that might be adopting these service solutions from several organizations and combining them together. I think that’s the biggest thing, is being flexible in how you adopt technology because it is a foundation to how you do things.

Joe (31:21):
Okay. Alright. Well guys, I want to thank you so much for joining us on the show today. It was very enlightening. I’ve got a lot of notes to comb through. I’m sure I’ll have a thousand more questions as will our guests, if we want to reach out to you, how can we get in touch?

Charles (31:37):
Yeah, sure. From my perspective, Charles Brennan, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m very active on there. You can reach out to me at CBrennan@nucleusresearch.com. If you want to email me any questions I’d be happy to address them. But yeah, thank you very much for having me on today. It was a great conversation and as Amber said, I hope we educated the market. That’s the biggest thing. I really wanted to demystify this notion of composable architectures because there is so much out there. There is a lot of fluff out there and we really need to uncover what’s actually going on and who’s really doing a good job at it. So hopefully we did that today and really enjoyed being on here.

(32:12):
Joe:

(32:12):
Got to do your research.

(32:13):
Charles:

(32:13):
Of course

(32:13):
Joe:

(32:13):
Amber, how can folks get in touch with you?

Amber (32:16):
You can reach out to me through any channel that you might tap into GAINS right now. If you’re a current GAINS customer or a prospect or if you’re interested in GAINS you can come to our website and request more information or you can reach out to me directly at ASalley. My last name is S-A-L-L-E-Y, at gainsystems.com.

Joe (32:42):
Well, I want to thank you both so much. This has been a great enlightening conversation. Thank you so much for your time, and I can’t wait to have you back on the show.

Charles (32:48):
Thank you, Joe. Thank you, Amber. Thank you guys for having me on.

Amber (32:50):
Yeah, thanks Charles. Thanks Joe.

Joe (32:52):
You bet. And that’s a wrap on part two of our conversation with Amber Salley and Charles Brennan. We hope this episode of GAINS On is already sparking ideas for your own supply chain evolution. From AI you can actually use to modular rollouts that move faster and deliver value sooner, this conversation reminded us that the future of supply chain is about giving smart people better tools to solve real problems. Thanks again to Amber and Charles for sharing their insights and to you for tuning in. If you found this episode helpful, share it with a colleague, subscribe if you haven’t already, and stay tuned. We’ve got plenty more where this came from. As always, keep learning, keep innovating, and remember we’re all in this together. 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.

(33:49):
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