GAINSystems

Boosting Profits and Mitigating Risks With Supply Chain Optimization

Follow GAINSystems on :

Bill Benton, CEO

“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” — Jonathan Swift

Every visionary in this world shares one common trait: a stubborn dedication to break the status quo. The founder of GAINSystems, an inventory and supply chain optimization solutions pioneer, William C. (Bill) Benton, was no different.

When Bill founded GAINSystems in 1971, he saw an opportunity to help businesses plan more accurately and achieve more efficient outcomes. Through the application of operations research optimization and algorithmic planning and forecasting, he helped manufacturing, distribution, retail, and maintenance operations teams gain efficiencies and improve customer service. To solve these complex business challenges, Bill and his team launched the GAINS® Supply Chain Planning and Optimization platform—a set of stochastic (probability-driven) processes comprising a suite of models and algorithms. And the company journey began.

Today, GAINSystems is proudly led by his son, Bill Benton. With the latest generation of data science, machine learning, optimization and supply chain performance expertise, Bill and the GAINSystems team of experts focus on providing innovative AI-driven solutions to simplify and solve today’s complex supply chain challenges to generate value for customers. “We help businesses take a more proactive approach to solving their most complex supply chain challenges. We transform variability and chaos into visibility and optimal plans,” mentions Bill Benton, CEO, GAINSystems. And, with a recent investment from Francisco Partners, GAINSystems will accelerate R&D initiatives and grow its team faster as they continue to transform business planning.

Supply Chain is the Foundation of Every Business

Supply chains generally consist of multiple internal and external stakeholders who collaboratively work together to get the right products to the right place at the right time for the right cost. Any disruption impacts all the parties involved from customers to suppliers. Serving over 500 customers, GAINSystems helps accelerate decision-making and provides a unified and connected supply chain plan by breaking through the data silos and ensuring a seamless flow of market information aligning the factory floor to the customer’s doorstep.

Typically, organizations rely on ERP systems to ensure accurate and timely access to reliable information. Despite such advantages, ERP systems focus on transaction processing, not optimizing multiple planning and business scenarios to achieve desired outcomes.

Given the complexity of present-day global supply chains, businesses need to dynamically optimize inventory investments by item and location while maintaining desired service levels. “When manufacturers operate locally, it is easier for them to ensure a shorter lead time or identify disruptions. However, business planning becomes significantly more complex with globalized supply networks due to demand variability, longer lead times and increased volatility around production schedules, supplier reliability, shipping constraints and stringent delivery expectations. This highlights the need to create a digital twin that models the physical network of plants, distribution centers and key suppliers to reliably serve customers and achieve revenue and profitability goals,” Bill explains. Such challenges have been further amplified by the global pandemic, creating greater volatility and uncertainty—such as delaying the supply of components and raw materials, disrupting manufacturing operations, and dramatically changing customer demand patterns.

Becoming Proactive

GAINSystems’ primary objective is to help businesses become more proactive and weather these challenges (and many others)via event-driven evaluation of detailed supply and demand signals. “We focus on solving the complex tradeoffs of supply and demand balancing and suggest meaningful ways to optimize inventory investments and synchronize replenishment plans.

Our customers gain visibility, become more proactive and consistently improve customer service, reduce costs and grow profit margins

Our customers gain visibility, become more proactive and consistently improve customer service, reduce expediting, cut costs, and grow profit margins while managing production scheduling constraints,” says Bill.

Staying true to this objective, GAINSystems automates solution deployment with an innovative “self-parameterization” process. Most other supply chain planning tools require users to manually set parameters according to their business needs and objectives which can drain resources and extend implementations timelines. However, GAINSystems accelerates time-to-value by automating this important configuration process in an innovative and hyper-efficient manner. Customers emphasize a unique value in working with GAINSystems is the easy and timely on-boarding to the GAINS platform which typically implements in 10-to-12 weeks. “We accelerate the time-to-value. This automation is just one example of how we help customers move faster and reduce effort over time with a more sustainable solution. Saving time and effort enables our customers to focus on their business goals,” Bill informs. “Building on these quick wins’, we then focus on refined prediction and optimization as well as intra and inter-enterprise collaboration at scale which greatly enhances business resiliency.”

The GAINS platform is cloud-native, giving every member involved in the supply chain planning process seamless access to vital information—building transparency and synchronizing global operations. And, the GAINS platform can be easily integrated with any ERP or other enterprise systems to harness needed data and drive better decision-making.

Comprehensive AI-driven Insights

Recognized as a Visionary by Gartner as well as other industry analysts, the GAINS solution platform has four key elements: demand planning and forecasting, inventory optimization, replenishment optimization, and sales& operations planning (S&OP).

The demand planning and forecasting generates highly accurate forecasts based both on historic demand and seasonality as well as point of sale (POS) data, syndicated data, machine/fleet aftermarket usage, and other leading indicators to drive Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) scenarios. As such, customers gain visibility, ensure bottom-up (volumetric) and top-down (financial) collaboration, increase planner productivity, and improve new product introductions (NPIs)including short/seasonal life cycles.

The inventory optimization solution takes into account comprehensive cost and source variabilities, service-level goals, demand plan variability, supplier reliability, multi-echelon dependencies via bills-of-material and/or across distribution, and lead-time for every SKU/location across the enterprise. This helps businesses optimize inventory policies, service levels, network flow, and overall inventory investments.

Replenishment optimization helps businesses manage millions of SKU/location decisions by predicting supply needs, generating or changing crucial supply orders, and adapting to changing demand patterns. For many GAINS customers this becomes a highly automated process.

Finally, the S&OP business process brings all the sales, marketing, production, finance, and procurement data into a single comprehensive plan. This accelerates decision-making and strategic planning by enabling the executive team to quickly compare multiple business scenarios, mitigate risks, evaluate revenue plans, and harness new market opportunities while meeting customer service goals. “With GAINS, finance, marketing, sales and supply chain are aligned around one comprehensive plan which can be viewed in revenue, as well as detailed units by SKU, by location,” declares Bill.

S&OP also provides powerful scenario planning that enables businesses to confidently evaluate ever-evolving global business or political scenarios. More importantly, GAINS follows a single canonical data model that drives all these different functions.

Customers get even greater visibility with GAINS SCO Network which helps ensure cross-enterprise synchronization with trading partners including executing transactional processes (order placement and quotation request) and master data management on one centralized platform. “We help customers sense and respond faster aligning demand with supply as well as synchronizing master data. There is one version of the truth and clear accountability,” Bill adds. The company also provides Optimization-as-a- Service without requiring any software implementation, integration, or system training. It enables businesses to better plan their inventory, design multi-echelon strategies and leverage the GAINS team of experts to deliver optimized business planning. “Optimization-as-a-Service is the next generation of planning resilience & streamlining,” claims Bill.

Best Practices for Unique Supply Chain Needs

GAINSystems believes every customer can benefit from industry best practices but may also have some unique business requirements, which makes it essential for GAINS to conduct both empirical and subjective assessments. From the empirical aspect, GAINSystems performs time-lapse simulations of supply chains to model each customer’s network performance including inventory turns, service delivery, expediting/transportation cost, etc. via transaction data. On the subjective side, GAINS strives to understand current workflows and business goals to draw an optimal plan.

With GAINS, finance, marketing, sales and supply chain are aligned around one comprehensive plan which can be viewed in revenue, as well as detailed units by SKU, by location

Forging a comprehensive implementation methodology, GAINSystems has enabled more than 500 companies to improve their operational performance. For instance, a global manufacturer of electrical and industrial automation products was conducting demand planning in a very siloed manner. “They were using a lot of Excel spreadsheets to analyze inventory to feed SAP. This led to intensively manual manufacturing and purchase planning which limited optimization and introduced additional business risk,” Bill adds. The global manufacturer worked initially with GAINSystems for multi-echelon inventory optimization and quickly gained clarity around how to optimize global inventory with greater confidence. They also subsequently moved into holistic demand planning (consensus planning and scenario planning) with S&OP. As a result, they could ensure a better grip on their demand scenarios and plan accordingly, increasing revenue, lowering costs and improving customer service.

Such instances of customer success always drive GAINSystems to explore new avenues of growth and continuously enhance its capabilities. In the short term, the company is focusing on further leveraging artificial intelligence for optimization modeling around multi-enterprise networks, scenario analysis, and network structure into the planning process—and even into the execution process to provide a unique and comprehensive continuous planning platform that supports strategic, tactical and operational decisions. In the long run, the company will strive to make further automation an integral part of its solution to reduce and gradually eliminate any detailed human intervention.

With a focus on providing transformational business results instead of projects, GAINSystems has been able to stay true to its vision of optimizing the complex relationships between supply and demand, sourcing and procurement, to reduce operating costs, automate routine planning, and drive better business decisions.

Share this Article:

GAINSystems

Company
GAINSystems

Management
Bill Benton, CEO

Description
With the latest generation of data science, machine learning, optimization and supply chain performance expertise, Bill Benton and the GAINSystems team of experts focus on providing innovative AI-driven solutions to simplify and solve today’s complex supply chain challenges to generate value for customers.Serving over 500 customers, GAINSystems helps accelerate decision-making and provides a unified and connected supply chain plan by breaking through the data silos and ensuring a seamless flow of market information aligning the factory floor to the customer’s doorstep. GAINS solution platform has four key elements: demand planning and forecasting, inventory optimization, replenishment optimization, and sales& operations planning (S&OP)

GAINSystems News

GAINS Signs Global Supply Chain Partnership With Netlogistik

Long-time partnership extends NetLogistik's Latin America reseller agreement and expands to provide global delivery and support services to GAINS customers

CHICAGO - GAINS,

a leading provider of cloud-based solutions for optimizing supply chain performance, today announced that Netlogistik had signed a multi-year global partnership agreement to provide implementation and support to GAINS customers, as well as extending their reseller agreement for the Latin America region. GAINS is expanding its partner network to enhance the customer experience with in-country experts from partners, including Netlogistik. The companies have successfully partnered since 2005, with Netlogistik deploying GAINS at numerous accounts, including Coel, Distribuidora Tamex, and Tiendas Extra. Under the new agreements, GAINS' global SAP integration customers can also access Netlogistik's team of SAP-certified analysts for implementation and support services.

"Netlogistik has been a long-time partner of GAINS, and we are delighted to build further on this successful legacy," said Bill Benton, Co-Founder of GAINS. "From the initial exploration through implementation and ongoing support and value creation, netLogistik ensures that GAINS customers receive the best experience possible and recognize measurable results from their investment. We are proud to both renew and expand our relationship with Netlogistik to provide the best service possible to the LATAM market."

Netlogistik has more than 300 specialists across the globe with deep supply chain expertise in distribution, CPG, and retail. They have offices and consultants throughout the Latin America region and worldwide, including Mexico and Columbia, along with SAP-certified analysts to provide multi-lingual support of GAINS SAP integrations.

"GAINS and Netlogistik have a history of successful deployments in Latin America with customers realizing continuous improvements to their inventory positions, demand planning, and much more," said Marco Martinez, Managing Partner at Netlogistik. "Given the ongoing volatility of supply chains, their solution is needed more than ever. Our experts make the most of the GAINS Performance Optimization Platform for every customer and walk alongside them on every step of their journey toward supply chain excellence."

The Power of Continuous Inventory Right-Sizing: Optimizing Supply Chains in an Uncertain World

GAINSystems When companies integrate performance optimization platforms into their operations, everyone stands to gain. In the current business landscape, marked by labor shortages, supply chain limitations, and market fluctuations, ensuring the timely presence of appropriate products in the right locations has become a paramount challenge for organizations. Conventional inventory management solutions and processes that rely on stability and predictability have demonstrated ineffectiveness. In this era of heightened uncertainty, the pathway to success lies in consistent, data-driven evaluations, strategic planning, and decision-making. By embracing performance optimization platforms, companies can achieve a continuous process of right-sizing their inventory, ultimately leading to enhanced outcomes for all stakeholders.

A Changing Inventory Landscape In the past, inventory requirements were comparatively foreseeable due to stable inventory drivers. However, this scenario has transformed. Companies that have implemented advanced planning systems without accounting for lead time variations now find themselves grappling with elevated inventory levels. As Lora Cecere, the founder of Supply Chain Insights, recently pointed out, "Since 2007, businesses have added 27 more days of inventory, highlighting the need for adjustments in optimization engines to cope with heightened variability."

The Significance of Flexible Inventory Strategies Flexible inventory strategies and processes have gained heightened importance in today's business environment, where inventory is no longer regarded as cost-free. Organizations must formulate strategies that align with market conditions, optimize onsite and transit inventory levels, and factor in variables such as visibility, supplier partnerships, demand volatility, and accurate forecasting. By doing so, companies can reduce expenses, bolster return on working capital, and enhance overall operational effectiveness.

Empowering Companies with GAINS for Right-Sizing Inventory GAINS, a cloud-based supply chain planning software, presents a solution to the inventory challenges that companies face. This platform equips businesses with potent insights and capabilities, enabling them to make informed decisions, increase sales, enhance service levels, and cut operational costs. Through the utilization of GAINS' proven demand, supply, and inventory optimization platform, organizations of various sizes can continuously optimize costs and profits.

Ongoing Enhancement with GAINS Integrating GAINS' solution empowers companies to heighten their visibility into inventory planning and continually fine-tune their inventory positions. By harnessing the platform's capabilities, businesses can aptly adjust their inventory investments, automate order optimization, streamline planning efficiency, elevate service levels, optimize product flow, and account for costs related to transportation, production/distribution, and inventory. GAINS' robust scenario planning feature equips businesses to proactively address challenges and attain desired results.

Navigating the Journey toward Performance GAINS empowers companies to make sound inventory decisions, resulting in immediate improvements, enhanced financial performance, and increased customer satisfaction. The platform offers inventory policy management that aids in achieving optimal service levels by reallocating investments across different product lines and stocking locations. GAINS follows a practical approach to supply chain management, guiding companies through phased implementation to acquire incremental value and drive continuous improvement.

Preparation for Upcoming Disruptions While supply chain volatility may have eased, companies must not become complacent, as the next disruptive event could be imminent. Organizations must adopt supply chain solutions that continually fine-tune their inventory positions to navigate uncertainties in the future. GAINS provides a robust, cloud-based platform that empowers businesses to optimize inventory levels, ensure resilience, and effectively meet demand.

Case Studies: Enhancing Performance in the Face of Market Volatility

The success stories presented by GAINS demonstrate the advantageous outcomes that enterprises have garnered through the consistent fine-tuning of their inventory management. To illustrate, the implementation of GAINS yielded remarkable improvements for Grimco, a nationwide wholesaler engaged in the production and distribution of sign supplies. This encompassed enhancements in inventory optimization, concentration on core items, and the augmentation of order fulfillment rates. Similarly, Benco Dental, a preeminent private entity providing comprehensive distribution of oral healthcare technology and supplies, harnessed the inventory optimization capabilities of GAINS to amplify its market presence and provide superior customer service.

Grimco – Empowering the Wholesale Sign Supply Vertical: Grimco was confronted with the intricate challenge of upholding optimal inventory levels while catering to the demand for next-day order fulfillment. By enlisting GAINS, Grimco effectuated an elevation in inventory health and a notable upswing in next-day order fulfillment rates. Through this platform, Grimco gained heightened insights into demand trends, lead times, and market indicators, which in turn facilitated the streamlining of its inventory placements. As a direct outcome, superfluous stock was mitigated, leading to the improvement of working capital. Moreover, their commitment to punctual deliveries was fortified, thereby amplifying customer contentment.

Benco Dental – Pioneering Dental Distribution Services: Benco Dental, occupying a prominent stature as the principal privately-owned distributor of dental supplies, equipment, and services within the United States, sought the prowess of GAINS to surmount the intricacies tied to their multifaceted inventory portfolio. Through a judicious utilization of the platform's data-driven decision-making capabilities, Benco Dental meticulously optimized its ordering frequency and quantities, curbing instances of stock depletion, and concurrently elevating service levels. GAINS emerged as the beacon guiding them toward optimal stocking locations and precision inventory curation, tailored to cater to diverse customer demands effectively.

These comprehensive case studies underscore the universal applicability of performance augmentation tools like GAINS across diverse industrial sectors. By leveraging insights rooted in data analysis and perpetually refining inventory alignment, enterprises are poised to unlock an array of benefits, encompassing enhanced operational efficiency, cost reduction, superior customer service, and heightened profitability.

The strategic implementation of continuous inventory optimization has crystallized as an indispensable tactic for enterprises navigating the dynamic and unpredictable business terrain. In light of market volatility, organizations are increasingly embracing performance enhancement platforms such as GAINS.

Border States and GAINS Partner on AI Lead Time Prediction

FARGO - Border States has partnered with GAINS to leverage the new GAINS Halo360° Decision Engineering and Orchestration Platform to deliver a machine learning (ML) solution to improve lead time accuracy and supply chain performance. Today, there is unprecedented pressure on working capital as lead time variability makes it difficult for supply chain professionals to optimize inventory and align procurement decisions. GAINS Lead Time Prediction (LTP) enables Border States to determine lead times with greater accuracy, resulting in enhanced customer service, aligned inventory and procurement functions, and improvement in working capital.

Composed in GAINS Halo360°, the AI-powered lead time prediction solution uses lateral learning to rapidly respond to changing environments and generate trustworthy lead time predictions for items with limited or no supply data. Using Border States’ data and ML techniques, GAINS LTP creates a model unique to the distributor’s supply chain. As the model is continually trained using Border States’ latest dataset, the solution will calculate lead times with greater and greater accuracy over time.

“Border States is always looking for new and innovative ways to add value throughout the supply chain for our customers, vendors and other employee owners,” said Richelle Bishoff, VP Procurement. “Partnering with GAINS to customize and develop transformative technology, like the lead time prediction tool, will support our ability to serve unstoppable businesses, because we know they can’t go it alone. This technology is one of the most exciting advancements in inventory and demand planning the industry has seen in many years, and we are thrilled to be ushering in these capabilities together.”

“Helping Border States exceed customers’ expectations drives GAINS’ Data Science team to innovate and deliver new machine learning and AI capabilities,” said Amber Salley, Vice President of Industry Solutions at GAINS. “Leveraging Halo360°, the GAINS Lead Time Prediction service uses machine learning to deliver a higher level of accuracy than traditional methods. Companies become more confident in their replenishment decisions, avoid value leakage and better meet service, cost and capacity goals — a difficult task given the volatility of today’s markets. We are delighted to partner and collaborate with the Border States team on this successful project and excited about the results they already see from the Halo360° offering.”

Border States supplies products and services to construction, industrial and utility customers. The 100% employee-owned company is rated the sixth largest electrical distributor in the United States by Electrical Wholesaling magazine. Border States has more than 3,200 employee-owners and 120 branches in 29 states. The Branch Support Center (corporate office) is located in Fargo, North Dakota.

GAINS is the supply chain performance optimization company helping companies fulfill their customers' promises. Their first-in-class, best-in-breed composable GAINS Halo360° Decision Engineering and Orchestration Platform transcends traditional silos of ERP, supply chain planning and network design enabling integrated, smarter, faster, and composable decisions across the time to plan horizons from strategic design to order execution. Specifically designed to manage volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), GAINS customers are able to focus on prioritizing the right decisions at the right time at the right speed and scale to optimize supply chain performance, improving profitability and customer confidence.