GAINS Features & Functions

GAINS best-of-breed, specialised capability encompasses Demand Planning & Forecasting, Inventory Optimisation, Replenishment Planning & Supplier Management.

Demand Planning & Forecasting

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GAINS provides accurate, plausible and optimised demand plans using sophisticated statistical techniques. GAINS uses specifically designed statistical models (more than 30) designed to automatically recognise observed demand patterns and predict baseline future demand. These models have the ability to recognise distinct demand patterns, including:
  • Seasonal
  • Trending
  • End-of-life
  • Sporadic/low-volume/’lumpy'

GAINS can also manage, utilise and incorporate other sources of information in the forecasting process, including:
  • Point-of-sale data 
  • Machine/fleet usage 
  • Price elasticities 
  • Macroeconomic indicators such as changes in housing starts, interest rates, vehicle purchases
  • Supersession data for new product launches (NPD), including like-item attribute recognition
  • Including market intelligence and other extrinsic information, via cross-department and cross-enterprise collaboration
  • Managing work-flow across multiple groups in the organisation (such as marketing, sales, finance, operations) 
  • Sharing demand plans with suppliers and customers for notification, validation, and refinement

GAINS has sophisticated forecasting technology to predict shifts in demand from observed trends:
  • These trends are Leading Indicator Analysis (LIA); where the trend being before demand is impacted
  • Leading Indicator data is interfaced to GAINS, and influences the demand forecast
  • Examples of leading indicators include: weather, interest rates, housing starts, unemployment rates, currency fluctuations etc
  • GAINS runs a multi-variate regression analysis against these leading indicators and observes demand to calculate the relative influence of a given indicator

Inventory, Stocking & Sourcing Policy Optimisation

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GAINS determines where and how much to stock of each item at every location by considering a comprehensive set of factors and constraints with sophisticated, automated, proprietary algorithms. These provide the ability to optimise a variety of outcomes, including:

Inventory policy optimisation that considers a comprehensive set of sources of planning error to identify the optimal ordering sizes and safety stocks required to consistently deliver target service levels given organisational constraints such as working capital or purchasing budgets: 
  • demand plan/forecast error 
  • lead-time variation  
  • yield/supplier performance 
  • optimal ordering cycles
  • integrates with planogramming systems 
  • manages store presentation requirements
Multi-echelon/indenture stocking policy optimisation algorithms that determine whether or not to stock an item and at what service level to stock each item given: 
  • impact on total costs and/or profit 
  • interdependencies among locations 
  • interdependencies within a bill-of-material (BOM)
  • customer expectations 
Sourcing optimisation that determines the supplier(s) that provide the
lowest total-cost supply considering:
  • ordering minimums and volume-discounts
  • in-bound logistics costs
  • lead-time and lead-time performance
  • procurement costs
Routing (i.e. network-flow) optimisation that considers which supplier provides lowest total-cost supply and how to plan to flow product through the network, considering:
  • inventory savings of hub-&-spoke via buffer-stock pooling
  • re-handling and transportation cost savings of direct-from-supplier shipping
  • hybrid advantages of ‘cross-dock’ logistics

Replenishment Optimisation

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GAINS provides automated replenishment suggestions to create or change supply orders. This ensures that inventory returns to optimal levels given the pre-determined GAINS demand plan and inventory policy targets.

GAINS considers the requirements, constraints and planning parameters for each item to determine the optimal replenishment plan, including:
  • Available inventory
  • Lead-time requirements
  • Optimised order quantities
  • Safety stocks
  • Parent-child relationships
  • BOM requirements
  • Inventory carrying costs
  • Inventory receiving costs

This allows GAINS to conduct:
  • New order creation and prioritisation
  • Exception Management to focus attention on 'bang for buck' actions (such as likelihood of stockouts)
  • Optimised expediting and de-expediting that considers the costs/benefits of actions
  • Transfer order prioritisation and optimised re-distribution 
  • Auto-approve orders that meet specified criteria
  • 'Rough-cut’ production capacity optimisation
  • Optimised component allocation, that allocates components to multiple later-stage items to minimise finished goods stockouts across the entire network 
  • Cross-dock optimisation, that dynamically re-determines target locations for in-bound supplies
  • Rotables planning optimisation that considers unique repair parts planning needs such as:
  1. core/carcass reverse logistics 
  2. variable repair times
  3. capacity constraints
  4. repair yields and requirements to ‘refresh’ the rotable pool with new purchases
  5. potential ‘zero-sum’ rotable pool constraints/parameters 
  • Order pooling, that builds multi-item, potentially multi-location, orders that minimise the cost related to meeting supplier constraints (such as minimum value, full-container load, etc) 
  • Cycled production management that optimises inventory policy and ordering in light of fixed ordering cycles (e.g. batched production runs) 

Supplier Collaboration & Portals

Supplier Collaboration Planning
GAINS provides the ability to automate flow planning and execution of data to and from suppliers to coordinate priorities and manage value-added changes in plan:
  • purchase order manager that facilitates web-based communication of initial orders as well as subsequent changes (expedite/de-expedite requests) in a prioritised and value-driven fashion  
  • supplier planning portal that provides configurable and secure requirements forecasts to ensure supplier readiness and improved delivery performance (to drive lower costs for both parties) 
  • supplier scorecard that provides detailed and objective performance measures in both absolute and relative (i.e. ranking) terms including estimating cost impacts of performance issues