APS Has Grown Up: What Planning Platforms Like GAINS Can Now Do, and Why It Matters
Ten years ago, two things in a supply chain lived in different buildings. The planning system sat with the planners: it forecast demand, set reorder points and pushed purchase and production proposals into the ERP every night. The network model sat with a consultant: a one-off study, every four or five years, that decided how many distribution centres you had and where, and was out of date by the time the slides were printed.
That separation is why so many Australian networks have drifted. The planning system optimised stock inside a structure nobody had looked at since the last acquisition. The structure was only ever revisited when a lease expired or a board got nervous.
The useful thing that has happened to advanced planning systems in the last decade is that the two buildings have merged. The network model, the inventory policy, the demand forecast and the disruption scenario now sit in one system, on the same data, and the answer from one flows into the other. We are going to use GAINS as the example, because it is the platform we use hands-on and because it is a clear case of the shift. We work with GAINS in Australia and New Zealand, and we rate it for a particular kind of business, so read this knowing that, and read the section on what it still will not do for you with the same attention as the rest.
What changed in ten years, in plain terms
From a nightly batch to a living model. The old APS ran overnight and produced a plan you reacted to in the morning. Modern platforms hold a continuously updated model of the network and let you ask it questions during the day. That sounds small. It is the difference between a report and a tool.
From a point forecast to a range. Statistical forecasting assumed demand was knowable. Machine learning changed the forecast from one number to a distribution, and the better platforms now predict supplier lead times the same way, which matters more than the demand forecast for most Australian importers sitting at the end of a ten-week ocean leg.
From safety stock by location to inventory across the network. Single-location reorder points gave way to multi-echelon inventory optimisation, which decides how much to hold centrally versus regionally as one question rather than site by site.
From planning only to planning plus design. This is the big one. In May 2023 GAINS acquired 3 Tenets Optimization, a supply chain design specialist whose customers included The Home Depot and Newell Rubbermaid, citing Gartner’s observation that more frequent design reviews were making analytical tools critical. Other vendors have made similar moves. The result is that network design is now a capability inside the planning platform rather than a project outside it.
From “what if” in a spreadsheet to scenarios with decisions attached. Scenario planning used to mean a fortnight of spreadsheet work and a slide. It now means a library of scenarios run through a simulation of the actual network, each with a trigger and a pre-agreed response.
From recommendation to action. The newest shift is that the platform does not stop at a recommended order. It can place it, within rules you set, and tell you why. Call it agentic if you like. In practice it means fewer manual overrides and a planner who spends the day on exceptions.
What GAINS looks like now
Stripped of vendor language, GAINS today is five things on one data model.
Demand prediction, including lead-time prediction. Multi-echelon inventory optimisation, which is where GAINS made its name with inventory-heavy distributors, manufacturers and service-parts businesses. Supply and replenishment planning that generates the orders. Sales and operations planning on top. And Supply Chain Design, which is the capability this article is about.
The design capability is where the merger shows. GAINS models the supply chain using discrete-event simulation, covers network optimisation and long-range scenario planning, and uses what it calls a Decision Engineering and Orchestration layer to connect design, planning and operations to cost, service and risk priorities. It handles greenfield analysis, network optimisation, scenario modelling and full network simulation under what-if conditions. The model itself is built and run in an environment GAINS calls Supply Chain Architect, where its design team translates a client’s network and historical data into model inputs and runs network and inventory scenarios. An independent analyst, QKS Group, placed GAINS as the leader in its Q2 2026 SPARK Matrix for supply chain network design, highlighting continuous design, inventory optimisation integration, simulation-based scenario validation, tariff and cross-border cost modelling, and a design-as-a-service model.
Two points of honesty. First, GAINS is a packaged planning suite with design built in, not a build-your-own optimisation environment for a team of PhDs. For most Australian mid-market businesses that is a strength, because the design work gets done rather than engineered. Second, the simulation and the optimiser are only as good as the costs, lead times and constraints you feed them, which is where most of the work actually is. More on that below.
What this now lets an organisation do
This is the pragmatic part. Each of these is something we could not do with a planning system ten years ago, and each is something we have watched Australian organisations need this year.
Redesign the network every quarter, not every five years
What we see: a distributor’s network was designed in 2019, before the company bought two competitors and before diesel went up by two thirds. Nobody has re-run it because re-running it was a six-month project.
What you can now do: hold the network as a living model, with current freight and fuel costs, demand by customer and inventory policy by item, and ask it a structural question in a week. Should the Sydney DC close now that Melbourne is the manufacturing origin. Should Perth stock come direct through Fremantle. Does rail for the Melbourne to Brisbane leg pay at current diesel prices. GAINS’s own framing is that design stops being a one-time project and optimisation a separate function, so the network evolves as the business changes. In our experience the real change is behavioural: once the model exists and the data feeds are live, the executive team asks the question every quarter because the answer costs days, not months. gainsystems
Decide your disruption responses before the disruption
What we see: in March, when the Strait of Hormuz closed, most planning teams spent three weeks working out what it meant for them. By the time they knew, the April supplier was signed and the air freight bill was in.
What you can now do: build a short library of scenarios that matter to your business and run each through a simulation of your actual network, with inventory, transport and sourcing responding. A six-week closure of a trade lane. A key supplier down for a month. A major customer bringing a promotion forward. A 10 per cent tariff on a category. GAINS describes its approach as a scenario library tied to triggers and pre-decided actions, with the design, demand, inventory and agent capabilities connected so a scenario’s operational impact flows straight into planning. The practical result is a one-page response plan per scenario: what we stop, what we switch, what we hold, and who presses the button. When the trigger fires, the fortnight of analysis has already been done. gainsystems
Test a sourcing move with the whole network in the model
What we see: a manufacturer onshores a product family, the unit cost looks fine, and distribution cost rises because the network was built for product arriving in containers at Port Botany, not on pallets from Dandenong. We wrote about this in our recent piece on onshoring after the fuel shock.
What you can now do: put the sourcing change into the model before you sign. Scenario modelling in GAINS tests facility locations and roles, sourcing strategies and supplier changes, transport flows and inventory positioning, and compares options across cost, service and risk. So the nearshoring case for a product line comes with its network consequences attached: the inbound materials leg that did not exist before, the Perth leg that now starts in Melbourne, the safety stock that should fall, and the port of entry that should change. The sourcing decision and the network decision get made together, which is the only way they should be made. gainsystems
Reposition inventory when the structure changes
What we see: safety stock parameters set at go-live, overridden by hand ever since, and never reset when a DC was added, a supplier was switched or a lead time changed.
What you can now do: because the inventory optimiser and the network model share a data set, a change to the structure reprices the stock. Close a DC and the central safety stock adjusts. Add a backup supplier with a longer lead time and the items it covers get the longer leg in their policy. For an Australian business carrying $40 million of stock with a C-range at 20 weeks of cover, this is where the money is, and the network question and the inventory question stop being two projects.
Put fuel in as a band and watch the cheapest network move
What we see: network models built with a single diesel price, usually whatever it was when the model was built.
What you can now do: run the network at high, base and low fuel, and at this year’s and next year’s ocean rates, and see which structural decisions are robust across the band and which only work at a point. The redesigns that survive a 20 per cent swing in diesel are the ones worth funding. The ones that only work at the peak are the ones to park.
Plan capacity and fabrication alongside inventory
What we see: a distributor with a fabrication step (cut-to-length, kitting, assembly, finishing) planning that step in one tool and the stock that feeds it in another, with the two disagreeing weekly.
What you can now do: hold the fabrication capacity, the component stock and the finished-goods targets in one plan. We have used GAINS hands-on for fabrication and inventory planning with a large Australian distributor, and the practical gain was not a clever algorithm. It was one set of numbers that the fabrication supervisor, the inventory planner and the branch manager could all see.
Combine networks after an acquisition, or design one from scratch
What we see: two acquired businesses still running two networks four years later because nobody has done the combined design.
What you can now do: greenfield and combined-network analysis is a standard capability. GAINS lists creating combined network synergies among its network optimisation uses, alongside long-range scenario planning aligned to growth, M&A and sustainability targets. The integration business case that used to take a quarter of consulting time can be built in weeks on the platform, and more importantly it can be kept alive as the integration proceeds. gainsystems
Let the plan reach the order
What we see: planners overriding 60 per cent of system recommendations because they do not trust the number and cannot see why it moved.
What you can now do: with a platform that explains its recommendation and can act within rules you set, the override rate falls and the planner’s day changes. Reducing manual overrides and reactive planning is one of the outcomes GAINS claims for connecting design to execution. We would put it more carefully: the override rate falls when the planners have been trained on why the number moved and when forecast value added is measured. The tool enables it. The process delivers it. gainsystems
What it still will not do for you
It will not fix your data. Lead times that have not been updated since go-live, freight costs by lane that live in a forwarder’s invoice, minimum order quantities nobody has checked, bills of materials that do not match the factory. The model will run on all of it and produce confident nonsense. The data build is the first workstream of any design or planning implementation and usually the longest. We budget for it up front because the clients who did not are the ones who stalled.
It will not own the scenario library. A library nobody maintains is a slide deck with a login. Someone has to own the scenarios, refresh the triggers and run the quarterly network review. In the organisations that get value from this, that person exists and has the authority to move volume between suppliers and sites.
It will not run your S&OP. It makes the monthly meeting possible at scale by giving everyone the same numbers and letting the room run a scenario live. If the executives do not turn up and decide, it is an expensive reporting layer.
It is not every tool. GAINS is strongest where inventory is the problem: distribution, manufacturing with a distribution tail, service parts, retail replenishment. If your core problem is deep finite-capacity scheduling across a process plant with allergen sequencing and clean-in-place windows, look hard at the scheduling depth before you assume one platform does everything. We say this as a firm that likes GAINS.
It will not make the decision. It makes the trade-off visible in a week rather than a quarter. The executive still has to choose between cost, service and risk, and someone still has to sign the lease.
How organisations are actually using it
The most practical change we have seen is in who does the design work and how often. Instead of commissioning a network study every five years, a business keeps the model live and has someone run it quarterly, either internally or through a design-as-a-service arrangement where a partner maintains the model and brings the scenarios to the S&OP meeting. That is the model we run with clients: we build and maintain the model in Supply Chain Architect, keep the fuel, freight and demand inputs current, and bring the network and disruption questions to the table on a schedule rather than in a crisis.
The second change is sequencing. The businesses that get value start with the inventory optimisation, because that is where the measurable money is in the first six months, and switch on design once the data and the planners are ready. Starting with a grand network redesign on day one, before the data is clean and before anyone trusts the forecast, is the fastest way to end up with a sophisticated model nobody uses.
How Trace Consultants Can Help
Trace Consultants is an Australian supply chain, procurement and operations advisory firm. We work with distributors, manufacturers, retailers and large precincts on planning and network decisions, with senior people who have run these systems and these processes before.
Deciding whether and what to buy. Through our technology practice we run decision-led selections: the decisions that cost you money become the requirements, vendors demonstrate on your data, and we cost it over five years. We are platform-literate across the ERP suites, the large platforms and the specialists, and we have hands-on experience with GAINS. We tell you where it fits and where it does not.
Network design, continuously. Our strategy and network design team builds and maintains the network model, runs the quarterly design review and the disruption scenarios, and brings the answers to your executive team. We have built the case to open facilities and to close them, so we are not attached to either answer.
Getting the data and the planners ready. Our planning and operations work cleans the master data, sets inventory policy by segment, designs the S&OP process the platform will run, and trains planners on why the number moved so the override rate falls.
Scenario planning that is owned. Our resilience and risk management team builds the scenario library, defines the triggers and the pre-decided actions, and puts a named owner behind it.
Implementation from your side of the table. Our project and change management team runs the business side of the implementation: process design, data build, planner adoption and benefits tracking against the baseline we set before the project started.
We do this across FMCG and manufacturing, retail and property, hospitality and services, where the inventory and the network are the operation.
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Where to begin
If you already run a planning platform, find out whether its design capability is switched on and whether anyone has run a network scenario in the last year. Usually the answer is no, and the capability you are about to buy is one you already own.
If you are choosing a platform, write down the five structural questions you wish you could answer in a week, and make every vendor answer them on your data in the demonstration. A platform that cannot show you the Perth leg at two diesel prices is not the one.
If you are starting from spreadsheets, start with the inventory, get the data clean, and switch on design once the planners trust the forecast. Build the scenario library for the three disruptions that would actually stop you, and give it an owner.
And whichever of those you are, book the first quarterly network review in the calendar now. The capability is only worth having if the question gets asked on a schedule.
The bottom line
The planning system and the network model used to be two different things done by two different people on two different timescales. In platforms like GAINS they are one model, and that changes what an Australian business can do: redesign the network as often as the costs move, decide disruption responses in advance, test a sourcing move with its network consequences attached, and reposition stock the moment the structure changes. What it does not change is the need for clean data, a process with an owner, and an executive team willing to decide. The tool makes the trade-off visible in a week. The organisation still has to act on it.
If you want a plain view of whether your planning platform could be doing this already, or which one would, we are easy to talk to.
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