Baxter Planning Systems
Planning Tools and Talent for Supply Chain Optimization

Executives are challenged with delivering technology that will help their organization control costs in the supply chain while simultaneously improving the level of service they offer to their customers. This balancing of cost and service level is particularly challenging in the Service Supply Chain where organizations must offer aggressive same day part availability and service commitments in order to stay competitive.

Achieving your supply chain goals is possible with planning and execution solutions from Baxter Planning Systems. During our implementation process, we work with each customer to identify the unique attributes of their business that drive the cost of a stock-out. Based on this input, we configure our solution to identify the optimal target stock level for each item using our unique Total Cost Optimization model.

By comprehending both inventory and stockout costs, we consistently deliver an improvement in service level by ensuring that products are available to support customer demand while also keeping inventory and transportation cost under control.

We are proud to support our technology with supply chain experts that have experience which allows them to provide solutions beyond simply break-fix responses common for software tech support. The growing complexity of supply chains has the consequence of increasing difficulty in hiring the right people to manage them. Attracting and retaining the best supply chain talent is a key strategy for Baxter. We were recently recognized by our employees as a “Best Place to Work.” This award is a great recruiting tool that helps us increase our visibility in the competitive Austin employment environment. Through our partnership with Texas A&M’s Supply Chain Consortium, Baxter recruits employees from the leading-edge program. This relationship with a university recognized as a Top 25 Supply Chain program by Gartner, along with Best Places to Work accolades, enables us expand our pool of talent available to build innovative solutions and deliver them to customers to drive exceptional value.

Attracting and retaining the best supply chain talent is a key strategy for Baxter

As an alternative to a traditional software support model, we developed our “Planning as a Service” offering where our supply chain experts take responsibility for performing planning function across 9 practice areas. Baxter resources establish a relationship with each customer to identify business objectives they are looking to accomplish and drive results with our technology. Our experience of performing planning activity for customers across diverse industries has enabled us to develop best practices for adopting our solution. In addition to using these best practices to educate new users, we have leveraged them to build an objective methodology known as our Best Practice Scorecard to assess user adoption. Based on over 30 criteria across four categories, we use this scorecard to proactively identify and communicate opportunities for improving the amount of value received from our solutions.

Baxter has assisted a wide array of companies with achieving their supply chain goals. One example is a manufacturer of datacenter infrastructure technology. As a startup, this company lacked the resources to efficiently plan the service parts needed to support its rapidly growing client base that demanded four hours and next-day on-site hardware service commitments. With Planning as a Service, the company was able to focus on the business of datacenter infrastructure, leaving the day-to-day planning efforts to experts from Baxter. Results were impressive with days of supply reduced by over 46 percent while maintaining a service level of 99.9+ percent. This level of optimization was achieved during a period of steady growth within the first eight months of deploying the solution.