In Conversation at Trace: Savin Abeywardena on the breadth of supply chains, putting people first, and staying curious

Nai Yan joined Trace as a Manager in April 2026, bringing close to a decade of consulting experience from Deloitte, where she spent several years in Operations Transformation working across defence and government clients based in Canberra. She holds a Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Commerce from Deakin University and a Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice from ANU.

We sat down with Nai Yan to talk about her path from law into consulting, how government departments think about value differently to commercial clients, and why she thinks resilience is the piece too many supply chains still treat as optional.

You’re qualified in law and commerce, then went into consulting rather than practising. What pulled you across, and what does legal training give you that a conventional supply chain path might not?

NY: I got into consulting by pure accident! After missing out on graduate programs for most of the major law firms, I was told about a consulting graduate opportunity in Canberra. I didn’t know what consulting was, or what I was signing up for, but I gave it a shot, and the next thing I knew, I was in Canberra working as a graduate consultant!

I think my tertiary education gave me a broad range of skills. Commerce captured the numbers and spreadsheets side of things, while law captured the language and problem solving aspects.

Where I think legal training specialises is how it trains you to build an argument. When assessing a legal case in front of you, you don’t just identify what’s applicable and relevant.You need to identify a position, and build an argument for it. You have to ask yourself “why is this the way to go?” And in building that argument, you have to be prepared for any and all counterarguments—thinking through “how can someone pick apart my rationale?” 

For consulting, it means that you’re thinking through how your report or presentation can survive scrutiny from a client or a sceptical stakeholder, or how to best convince them that your recommendation is right for them.

So whilst I might not understand all the nuances of a warehouse like a traditional supply chain practitioner, my education gave me a specific way of approaching problems and making a case that I think serves me more than even I realise.

Defence and government supply chains carry a level of scrutiny most commercial work never sees. When the stakes are national capability or public money, how does that change the way you approach a problem?

NY: I think the key difference is the measure of success. For most commercial businesses, the ultimate goal is profit, either by increasing revenue or decreasing costs. In contrast, government departments, including Defence, focus on capability, or how it will serve the people. It’s not that cost isn’t a factor, it absolutely is when the money used is taxpayer money, but it’s the purpose for which they’re doing it that is the measure of success.

When it comes to money, government departments usually consider whether something is Value for Money (VfM): does it provide sufficient value for the money that is being spent? If something costs a lot of money, but will likewise bring a lot of value and benefit, then it is considered VfM and is likely to go ahead. It’s not the size of the project necessarily, it’s more about what is worth spending on.

It means that when you are faced with a problem, you’re not necessarily immediately thinking “how do I make this more cost efficient?” but more likely “what is the value that this will bring?” because you need to determine if it's VfM to determine if it will go ahead. It means that when you are considering factors and success, you’re not only looking at monetary or financial impacts, you’re looking at the broader value and benefits of the project.

You've spent time inside regulatory and compliance-heavy environments, most people treat that complexity as a hurdle. What does working within it actually teach you?

NY: Some people definitely view regulation and compliance as a burden and a barrier to progress, and yes, sometimes it does seem that way. It can definitely make things take longer or cost more to do, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it's a bad thing, especially if you’re not working in a commercial environment where the ultimate goal is profit.

Another way to view it is that regulation and compliance provide guardrails and guidelines on what is required. This way, you can create a fit-for-purpose product, because you are clear on what is needed to make it compliant.

Another perspective is that by putting in the effort at the start to ensure things are compliant or meet regulation, you’re saving yourself the headache later if it isn’t.You’re avoiding the time, effort, and cost of any consequences of non-compliance, potential rework or even replacement.

If you can change the perspective that regulation and compliance is there to make your life hard, and instead utilise it to help you, it can be something to leverage and propel you and your project forward.

Resilience and efficiency often pull in opposite directions, a lean operation is cheaper but more fragile. How do you help a client decide where that line sits for them?

NY: It generally comes down to what the client wants and needs—and what they want and what they need can be different.

Sometimes they want the nice shiny resilience option, but given their strategic priorities, financial budget or timeline pressures, they might have to opt for a leaner operation as that is what they can reasonably implement to meet the need. Of course the opposite can also be true. A less expensive option might be attractive, but the scenario might mean that a more resilient option is more feasible given the operational or system requirements.

These are just examples, and as with any decision making, I believe that clients need the information to make an informed choice. If they can clearly see the benefits, but also the costs—both financial and non-financial—as well as the timelines, alignment to strategy and so on, generally one of the options will emerge as more appropriate, at least at the moment.

By presenting clients with the information, it enables them to make an informed decision that is appropriate for them, at the time, in the scenario. There is no one-size fits all solution, after all.

You spent years at a large firm before moving to a boutique like Trace. What does a boutique let you do for a client that a big firm structure makes harder?

NY: I think both large firms and boutique firms have their pros and cons, and a lot of the time it comes down to what you want at your stage of your career.

For me, in the short time I’ve been at Trace, I’ve loved being on the ground and interacting with clients more—because we’re not a big name, because we're a smaller team, every Trace consultant has to be a part of the meeting, part of the conversation. It means that I can build deeper relationships with clients and understand them better. 

It also makes the work feel more meaningful, because I’ve heard directly from the client what isn’t working, or what they hope to improve. It makes every bit of the report writing, data analysis and slide design that little bit more personable, because I can hear the client in my head telling me why the work is important to them.

What's shifting in how supply chains need to be run that you don't think enough organisations have caught up to yet?

NY: I think the work Emma Woodberry is doing in building sustainability and resilience is an emerging, but critical, piece of the puzzle that supply chains don’t emphasise enough yet.

Most supply chains focus on the cost, and time, elements and where they are getting value, but making sure it is sustainable and resilient is a secondary priority: something to consider when times are good, but the impacts of not considering this are greatest when times are bad.

A good example is COVID. Prior to the pandemic, so many supply chains had focused on being a global supply chain, mostly for cost effectiveness, that when global trade faltered with lockdowns, many companies were suddenly without key products or parts that they had always relied on. They struggled because they had not built the ability to withstand the change and shock to their supply chains and had no idea how to continue to meet demand with the interruption to their supply.

If sustainability and resilience are considered for supply chains from the get go, or at least reinforced regularly, then the ability for organisations to withstand disruption and change is amplified, and supply chains everywhere will be more adaptable and viable in the long term.

Rhys joined Trace as a Manager in 2025, bringing nearly two decades of operational experience across retail and hospitality. Most recently at The Star Entertainment Group, he led strategy, process improvement, and stakeholder engagement across one of Australia's most complex hospitality environments—and as a founding member of The Star's Modern Slavery Working Group, championed dignity and transparency across their supply chains.

We sat down with Rhys to talk about what nearly two decades in operations taught him about consulting, why credibility matters more than methodology, and wher e he sees the biggest opportunities for organisations to improve experience and performance at the same time.

You spent almost 20 years inside businesses before moving into consulting. What does that background change about the way you work with clients?

RE: It makes me instinctively sceptical of solutions that look good on paper but haven’t been stress-tested against operational reality. I’ve worked across import, procurement, supply chain, and hospitality transformation — environments where the gap between a well-designed recommendation and what’s implementable can be significant. That sits with me when I’m building work for a client.

It also shapes how I enter a problem. I’m not leading with methodology, but with curiosity about what’s actually happening: where the friction is, what the team is working around, what the data is telling us. The guiding principle across my career has been understanding a system from the inside before trying to change it. In consulting, that instinct turns out to be a genuine asset.

The more industry-specific crafts of structuring problems, communicating recommendations, and managing engagements with rigour, is something I’ve continued to focus on over the last 18 months. But the underlying orientation was already there, and I think that combination is what led to my role here at Trace.

Your career has sat the intersection of customer experience and operational efficiency, which are often talked about as competing priorities. Do you see them that way?

RE: The tension is usually more apparent than real. When you trace most customer experience failures back to their root cause, you find an operational problem—a process gap, an inventory issue, a workflow creating inconsistency at the point of service. Improving the operation tends to improve the experience.

What makes it feel like a trade-off is usually a time horizon issue. The customer impact of an operational gap compounds until it shows up as a complaint, a lost regular, or a revenue trend. My approach has always been to make that linkage explicit early. Once it’s visible, the “balance” tends to resolve itself. 

Hospitality is one of the most operationally pressured environments there is. How do you get people to engage with improvement work when they're already flat out?

RE: You must start with the problems people are already feeling. Walking into a busy hospitality operation with a pre-determined transformation roadmap is a fast way to lose credibility. What works is listening first—understanding the workarounds, the friction points, the things that make people's days harder—and building improvement work around those, rather than arriving with a pre-formed agenda. In my experience, the most effective work comes from building strong relationships across all levels, from frontline teams through to the C-suite. In hospitality operations, you earn credibility and buy-in by proving your solutions hold up on the floor under pressure, not just in a workshop..

As a founding member of The Star's Modern Slavery Working Group, you focused on dignity and respect across supply chains. What drove you to get involved in that work, and what did you learn about the gap between policy and practice?

RE: Having spent almost a decade in both local and international procurement and supply chain, I had a clear view of how far removed conditions at the end of a supply chain can be from the values in a head office policy document. That visibility made it hard to stay on the sidelines.

What I learned is that the gap between policy and practice is rarely about bad intent, it’s structural. The commercial pressures flowing down through a supply chain don’t always carry the same values that sit in a sustainability framework. Closing that gap requires real visibility before it requires better policy; and that’s something I carry into supply chain advisory work now.

Treating people in supply chains with dignity creates better business outcomes, not just better ethics, that's something you've advocated for. Can you give an example of where you've seen that play out in practice?

RE: One place it starts is procurement decisions. Chasing the lowest price sounds rational, but it often just transfers cost pressure onto the supplier, and I’ve seen firsthand how that pressure creates the conditions for underpayment and poor working conditions further down the chain. The cheapest option frequently isn’t the best one when you account for what it costs elsewhere.

More broadly, supplier relationships built on transparency rather than pressure mean problems such as capacity constraints or quality risks surface earlier and get resolved before they become expensive. The alternative produces failures that are costly when they eventually land: disruptions, reputational damage, compliance issues.

It also shows up internally. The way people within an operation are treated shapes the culture guests encounter. Teams that feel respected bring a different quality of attention to the work, and customers notice, even when they can’t articulate why. Dignity isn’t separate from performance; it’s a driver of it. 

Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunities for organisations to improve customer experience and operational performance at the same time?

RE: Visibility is key. Most organisations are generating operational data they’re not utilising effectively: demand patterns, process flow times, where and when things fail. When that data is properly structured and accessible to decision-makers, improvements follow naturally because you’re working on evidence rather than assumption.

Closely related is the smart use of AI to reduce administrative burden on employees, such as reporting, scheduling, and coordination tasks that consume time without directly serving a customer. Deploying that time back toward the guest experience is a meaningful gain; it’s about using existing resources better, not reducing headcount.

The third is supply chain resilience. The last few years exposed how brittle lean, cost-optimised supply chains can be. The redesign work happening now, in diversifying sources, building in redundancy, and improving responsiveness, has a direct customer benefit when done well. Fewer stockouts, fewer service failures, fewer moments where the business can’t deliver on what it’s promised.

ERP vs APS: Why Your ERP Was Never Built to Plan

Walk into the planning team of almost any mid-sized or large Australian business and you will find the same thing. There is a multi-million-dollar ERP running the company, whether it is SAP, Oracle, or Microsoft Dynamics, and the people responsible for planning are quietly doing the actual work in Excel. The forecast lives in a spreadsheet. The safety stock calculation lives in another. The replenishment plan gets exported, massaged, and re-keyed back in. The ERP, for all its cost and reach, has become the place decisions get entered rather than the place they get made. That gap is the whole substance of the ERP vs APS question, and it is the reason advanced planning systems exist.

The question matters because the answer is rarely obvious from the inside. An ERP is a serious, expensive, business-critical system, and it is natural to assume that something so central must be capable of planning the supply chain it runs. It usually is not, at least not well, and the confusion between what an ERP does and what an advanced planning system, or APS, does costs Australian businesses a great deal in working capital, service, and wasted planner time. This article sets out the real difference between the two, which ERP planning modules businesses most commonly outgrow, what an APS genuinely adds, and, just as importantly, when your ERP is actually enough and you should not spend a dollar on anything more.

Why this question is landing on more desks right now

There is a practical reason the ERP vs APS conversation has become more common over the past two years, and it is worth naming because it changes the stakes. A large wave of ERP modernisation is underway, driven hardest by SAP. SAP has announced the end of mainstream support for ECC by December 31, 2027, after which no more security patches, compliance updates, or fixes will be delivered. Extended maintenance is available until 2030, at a significant cost premium. Yet the migration is running slowly. A Gartner report showed that in seven years licences for SAP S/4HANA have only been purchased by a third of SAP ECC customers, and 18 to 36 months is typical for a migration, longer in complex environments. Kellton + 3

This matters for planning because an ERP migration is the moment the planning gap becomes impossible to ignore. When a business re-platforms its core system, someone finally asks what the new ERP will do for demand forecasting, inventory optimisation, and replenishment, and discovers that the answer is "not much that it did not do before." The migration surfaces a decision that was always there but easy to defer: whether to keep planning in spreadsheets bolted onto a transactional system, or to put a purpose-built planning layer in place. Getting that decision right at the point of an ERP refresh is far cheaper than retrofitting it later, which is why so many Australian businesses are confronting ERP vs APS now rather than in a few years' time.

The cost of getting it wrong is not abstract. For most businesses, carrying costs typically range between 20% and 30% of total average inventory value per year, according to the Institute for Supply Management. Planning quality is the single biggest lever on how much of the wrong stock you hold, and a transactional system that cannot optimise leaves most of that lever untouched. Fishbowl Inventory

The core distinction: a system of record versus a system of decision

The cleanest way to understand ERP vs APS is to recognise that they are built to do fundamentally different jobs, and being excellent at one tells you almost nothing about being good at the other.

An ERP, or enterprise resource planning system, is a system of record. Its job is to transact and to hold the single, authoritative version of what is true: the orders, the inventory positions, the financials, the bills of material, the supplier records. It executes processes reliably at scale, it keeps the data consistent, and it is the backbone every other system relies on. SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, and the rest are extraordinarily good at this. When you place a purchase order, receive stock, or close the month, the ERP is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

An advanced planning system is a system of decision. Its job is not to record what happened but to work out what should happen next: how much to forecast, how much buffer to hold and where, when and how much to reorder, how to sequence production, and where to position inventory across the network. It does this through optimisation, heuristics, and increasingly machine learning, generating plans, simulating trade-offs, and recommending the decision that best balances cost and service against the constraints of the business. Where the ERP answers "what is true," the APS answers "what is the best thing to do about it."

That distinction is the whole game, and it explains the most common misunderstanding in the market. The ERP planning modules disappoint not because they are badly built, but because they were designed to execute a plan, not to work out what the plan should be. Asking your ERP to optimise your supply chain is like asking your general ledger to set your pricing strategy. It holds the numbers faithfully. It was never meant to decide them.

Why the ERP planning module disappoints

Most ERPs ship with planning functionality, usually centred on material requirements planning, and businesses understandably assume this covers them. In practice the limitations show up quickly, and they are structural rather than something a better configuration will fix.

The foundation of ERP planning is MRP, which works backwards from a production or demand plan to determine what materials are needed and when. MRP is genuinely useful and it has been around for decades, but on its own it assumes infinite capacity. It will happily generate a plan that requires more output than your factory or your suppliers can actually deliver, because checking feasibility against real constraints is not what it does. The result is a schedule that looks tidy on screen and falls apart in the real world, which is why planners learn not to trust it and revert to manual workarounds.

The deeper issue is that ERP planning is rules-based, not optimisation-based. It applies the parameters you give it: a fixed lead time in a field, a reorder point someone set two years ago, a flat number of weeks of cover across the catalogue. It does not search across thousands of possible plans to find the one that minimises total cost at your target service level, because it has no optimisation engine to do so. This is the difference between a calculator and a strategist. The ERP will faithfully compute the consequences of the policy you entered. It will not tell you that the policy is wrong, or find you a better one.

Three specific gaps follow from this, and they are exactly where the money sits. ERP planning treats lead time as a single fixed number rather than the variable, shifting distribution it actually is, which forces businesses to either guess high and carry excess or guess low and run short. It sets safety stock one location at a time, with no ability to optimise inventory across a multi-tier network, so every warehouse buffers against the same uncertainty and the business pays for the same protection several times over. And it produces a single forecast number rather than a probabilistic range, which is far less honest about uncertainty and far less useful for setting buffers intelligently. None of these are configuration problems. They are the boundaries of what a transactional system was built to do.

This is the same reason spreadsheets eventually fail, and it is no coincidence that businesses outgrowing their ERP planning are usually drowning in spreadsheets at the same time. The ERP cannot do the sophisticated planning maths, so planners export the data and attempt it manually, which does not scale, breaks when the person who built the model leaves, and produces the familiar situation where two reports disagree and nobody can explain why. The spreadsheet is not the disease. It is the symptom of an ERP being asked to do a job it was never designed for.

Which ERP planning systems businesses outgrow

The ERP vs APS question looks slightly different depending on which platform you run, but the pattern is the same across all of them: the native planning is MRP and reorder-point logic, supplemented heavily by spreadsheets, and it is that combination businesses outgrow. These are the systems we most often see prospects planning in before they move to an APS.

SAP (ECC and S/4HANA). The core planning is MRP and production planning. Larger SAP sites often added SAP APO, the Advanced Planner and Optimizer, which was SAP's APS application, the first version of which launched in 1998. APO is now being retired, and how SAP has handled that retirement actually proves the point of this article. APO's Demand Planning and Supply Network Planning are now covered by SAP IBP, while Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling and Global Available-to-Promise live on as embedded functionalities in SAP S/4HANA. SAP mainstream maintenance for APO ends in 2027. The successor, SAP IBP, introduced in 2015, is a cloud planning suite and is itself an APS. In other words, SAP's own roadmap keeps the planning layer separate from the ERP core, which is exactly the distinction we are describing. SAP shops weighing this are really choosing between adopting IBP and going best-of-breed with a platform such as Kinaxis, o9, or Blue Yonder. Implement + 3

Oracle (E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, and Fusion Cloud SCM). Oracle's ERPs carry native planning that is commonly outgrown once multi-echelon optimisation, demand sensing, or genuine scenario modelling are needed. Oracle offers its own supply chain planning cloud, and many Oracle customers also evaluate independent APS platforms alongside it.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 (Finance and Supply Chain Management, formerly AX). Dynamics uses MRP-based master planning, which is adequate for simpler operations and very commonly outgrown as range, network complexity, and demand volatility grow. It is one of the platforms we most often see prospects supplementing heavily with spreadsheets.

NetSuite. Oracle's cloud ERP is ubiquitous among growing Australian businesses, and its demand planning is deliberately light. It is usually the first system a scaling business outgrows on the planning side, well before it outgrows the ERP itself.

Pronto Xi. A long-standing Australian ERP common in distribution, manufacturing, and retail, with reorder-point planning that is typically run alongside extensive Excel models.

TechnologyOne. The major Australian ERP across government, local councils, universities, and health, where its supply chain and planning capability is thin and planning generally lives outside the system entirely. For public-sector and asset-intensive organisations this is a frequent starting point.

Infor, Epicor, Sage, QAD, IFS, and MYOB Advance. The mid-market field, used widely across Australian manufacturing and distribution. Each carries some planning functionality, and all of it is commonly outgrown for the same structural reasons set out above.

What businesses move to splits into two groups. The first is best-of-breed advanced planning platforms such as Kinaxis, o9, Blue Yonder, RELEX, ToolsGroup, OMP, Logility, and GAINS, which handle optimisation, multi-echelon inventory, and demand sensing at scale. The second, at the smaller and more inventory-focused end, is lighter tools such as Netstock and Slim4. The right destination depends entirely on the size and complexity of the supply chain and the maturity of the planning process behind it.

What an APS actually does that your ERP cannot

An advanced planning system sits above the ERP, drawing on its data as the single source of truth and feeding decisions back into it for execution. It is not a replacement for the ERP and it does not compete with it. It does the planning the ERP was never built to do, and the modern generation of these platforms has moved well beyond the rules-based calculation that ERP planning offers.

The defining capability is optimisation. An APS can search across an enormous number of possible plans and find the one that best balances service and cost against the real constraints of capacity, minimum order quantities, shelf life, and supplier limits. This is the step-change, because it shifts planning from "compute the result of my assumptions" to "find me the best decision." On top of optimisation, the leading platforms layer heuristics and machine learning to handle problems that are too large or too uncertain for classical methods, and to incorporate the variables, such as promotions, pricing, and weather, that statistical forecasting alone struggles with.

Several specific capabilities follow, and they map directly onto the ERP's gaps. An APS performs multi-echelon inventory optimisation, looking at the whole network at once and deciding where it is cheapest and most effective to hold buffer, which typically delivers the same or better service from materially less stock. It supports demand sensing, reading short-term signals to adjust the near-term forecast so the plan reflects what is happening this week rather than what a model assumed last quarter. The more capable platforms can predict lead times rather than assuming them, turning the same machine learning techniques used in demand forecasting onto the inbound side. And critically, an APS enables scenario modelling and exception-based planning, so the business can test "what if" before committing, and planners can spend their time on the genuine exceptions rather than re-keying thousands of routine orders that a system should generate automatically.

The combined effect is significant and measurable. On Trace's own planning and operations work, we typically see forecast accuracy improvements in the range of 20 to 40 per cent where businesses move from spreadsheet-driven planning to a structured process supported by an advanced planning system, and inventory carrying cost reductions of up to 30 per cent off the back of better demand and inventory planning. Those two outcomes are linked, because the inventory reduction is largely a consequence of the accuracy and optimisation gain. We explore the underlying mechanics of this in our piece on how advanced planning systems transform supply chain planning and on demand, inventory, and replenishment as a source of competitive advantage.

The honest part: when your ERP is actually enough

Not every business needs an APS, and one of the more useful things a genuinely independent adviser can tell you is when the answer is no. The ERP vs APS decision is not a question of sophistication for its own sake, and buying planning software you do not need is its own kind of waste.

For a smaller business with a simple supply chain, a limited range, stable demand, and short, reliable lead times, the planning functionality in a modern ERP such as Dynamics 365 or NetSuite, supplemented by some well-built spreadsheets, can be perfectly adequate. The maths that defeats an ERP, multi-echelon optimisation across thousands of items, probabilistic forecasting, network design, only becomes necessary when the scale and complexity of the supply chain make manual approaches genuinely unworkable. If your business is not at that point, an APS is an expensive answer to a question you do not have.

There is a more important caution underneath this. An APS is not a fix for a broken planning operating model, and the businesses that get the least from these platforms are usually the ones that bought the technology hoping it would supply the discipline their organisation lacked. A planning system amplifies the quality of the process it sits on top of. Implement it on clean data, a sound segmentation, a working sales and operations process, and clear accountability, and it is transformative. Implement it on the same broken process that produced the spreadsheet chaos, and all you get is faster, more expensive chaos. If your planning problems are really process and ownership problems, no amount of ERP-versus-APS deliberation will solve them, and the right first move is to fix the operating model, a theme we return to constantly, including in our look at why S&OP so often fails in Australia.

The same logic applies to the current excitement about autonomous, agentic planning. Layering intelligent automation onto an immature data and process base produces confident, fast, wrong decisions, which is why we take a deliberately pragmatic view in our article on agentic AI in the supply chain. The sequence that works, every time, is people, then process, then technology.

The symptoms that you have outgrown ERP planning

If you are weighing ERP vs APS, the most reliable signal is not the size of your business but the behaviour of your planning function. A few patterns reliably indicate that your supply chain has outgrown what SAP, Oracle, Dynamics, or any other ERP can do for planning:

• Your planners spend most of their time maintaining spreadsheets rather than planning, exporting data out of the ERP, working it manually, and keying decisions back in.
• You set safety stock and reorder points by rule of thumb, typically a flat number of weeks of cover, because the ERP cannot calculate buffers properly against demand and lead time variability.
• You cannot model a change before you make it, so questions like "what happens to service if we consolidate two DCs" get answered by instinct rather than analysis.
• Two reports disagree and nobody can fully explain why, because several people maintain their own versions of the plan and there is no single optimised source.
• Your forecast is a single number that is regularly wrong, with no sense of the range of likely outcomes and no systematic way to improve it. If forecasting is your weak point specifically, our guide to improving demand forecasting accuracy is the place to start.
• You are carrying too much of the wrong stock and too little of the right stock at the same time, expediting freight in one category while writing down ageing inventory in another.

One or two of these can often be addressed with better process. When most of them are true at once, you have reached the limit of ERP planning, and an APS is worth serious evaluation, provided the process and data foundations are sound enough to build on.

Getting the sequence right, especially during an ERP migration

For the many Australian businesses currently migrating their ERP, an SAP move to S/4HANA in particular, there is a real opportunity and a real trap. The opportunity is that a re-platform is the natural moment to design the planning layer deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the new ERP happens to offer. The trap is assuming the new ERP will close the planning gap on its own. It will be a better, more modern system of record. It will still not be a system of decision, because that is not what an ERP is for, regardless of vintage. As SAP's own split of APO into IBP and embedded S/4HANA functionality shows, even the vendor treats planning as a separate layer.

The sensible approach is to treat the ERP and the planning capability as two related but distinct decisions, and to get the foundations right first. Establish clean master data, the item attributes, lead times, costs, and supplier information that any planning system runs on, because poor data produces wrong plans no matter how good the optimisation engine is, and data readiness is a workstream in its own right rather than a box to tick. Get the demand forecast trusted and separated from the sales target. Set inventory policy deliberately against a service target. Stand up a planning and sales-and-operations process that actually makes decisions. Do that, and you will capture much of the available value before you have spent anything on an APS, and you will be in a far stronger position to choose and implement one if you decide you need it. Our broader perspective on this sits across our planning and operations and technology capabilities, and the full picture is set out in our guide to supply chain planning for Australia.

How Trace Consultants can help

At Trace Consultants, we help Australian and New Zealand businesses navigate exactly this decision, and we do it without a platform to sell, which means our advice is about what your business actually needs rather than what we are trying to move. Our practitioners have built and run planning processes inside businesses and have selected and implemented planning systems across retail, FMCG, and manufacturing, so we know that the technology is the easy part and the operating model is where the value is won or lost.

We tell you honestly whether you need an APS at all. We assess where your planning capability genuinely sits today, across forecasting, inventory, lead time, and S&OP, and give you a clear-eyed view of whether your ERP and a tighter process would serve you, or whether the scale and complexity of your supply chain genuinely warrant an advanced planning system. No vendor incentive, just your numbers.

We fix the process and data before the technology. Through our planning and operations work, we get the demand forecast trusted, the inventory policy set deliberately, the master data clean enough to plan from, and the S&OP process making real decisions, so that whatever technology follows amplifies a process that already works rather than accelerating one that does not.

We select and implement the right platform, properly. When an APS is justified, we help you choose the platform that fits your situation, whether that is SAP IBP alongside an S/4HANA programme or an independent platform, and implement it on a sound foundation. We bring genuine implementation experience, including with platforms such as GAINS, and a structured methodology that treats the rollout as a capability change rather than a software install. More on our approach sits on our technology page.

We connect planning to the structural decisions. Where you hold inventory is both a planning decision and a network decision, so our strategy and network design work makes sure the two are designed together rather than in separate rooms, and our sector depth across FMCG and manufacturing and retail means the approach fits how your business actually operates.

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Where to begin

If you are weighing ERP versus APS, resist the urge to start with a vendor demonstration. Start by being honest about where your planning capability actually is and what is really causing the pain. A short diagnostic across forecasting, inventory, lead time, and your S&OP process will usually reveal quickly whether your problem is a technology gap that an APS would close or a process and data gap that no software will fix. For most businesses the value is not evenly spread, and two or three disciplines are quietly costing the majority of the lost value.

From there, the sequence is the same whether or not you end up buying a platform. Fix the data discipline and the process first. Get the forecast trusted and separated from the target. Set inventory policy against a service level rather than habit. Stand up a planning process that makes decisions. If, having done that, the scale and complexity of your supply chain still defeat what your ERP can do, then evaluate an APS from a position of strength, with a clean foundation for it to optimise. That is the difference between a planning system that transforms the business and one that becomes an expensive disappointment.

Your ERP is the system that runs your business, and a good one is worth every dollar. It was simply never built to plan your supply chain. Knowing the difference, and acting on it in the right order, is what separates the businesses that take cost out and free up capital from the ones that keep firefighting the symptoms with the most expensive tools money can buy.

Frequently asked questions about ERP vs APS

What is the difference between an ERP and an APS?

An ERP, or enterprise resource planning system, is a system of record. It transacts and holds the authoritative version of your orders, inventory, financials, and master data, and it executes processes reliably at scale. An advanced planning system, or APS, is a system of decision. It works out what should happen next, the forecast, the inventory buffers, the replenishment, the production sequence, using optimisation, heuristics, and machine learning. The ERP answers what is true. The APS answers what is the best thing to do about it.

Can SAP, Oracle, or Microsoft Dynamics handle supply chain planning?

They can all do basic planning, usually through MRP, but they were designed to execute a plan rather than to work out what the plan should be. ERP planning is rules-based rather than optimisation-based, assumes infinite capacity, treats lead time as a fixed number, sets safety stock one location at a time, and produces a single forecast rather than a probabilistic range. For a small, simple supply chain that can be enough. For a complex one it leaves most of the value on the table, which is why businesses on SAP, Oracle, and Dynamics so often end up doing the real planning in spreadsheets.

What happens to SAP APO, and do I need SAP IBP or a third-party APS?

SAP APO is being retired, with mainstream maintenance ending in 2027. Its demand and supply network planning move to SAP IBP, and its detailed scheduling embeds into S/4HANA. SAP IBP is a cloud APS in its own right, so businesses face a genuine choice between adopting IBP and selecting an independent platform such as Kinaxis, o9, or Blue Yonder. The right answer depends on your wider SAP roadmap, your planning complexity, and the maturity of your planning process, and it should follow a clear-eyed assessment rather than a default to the incumbent.

Do I need an advanced planning system?

Not necessarily. If your supply chain is small and simple, with stable demand and reliable lead times, your ERP plus good spreadsheets may be adequate. You should consider an APS when the scale and complexity of your supply chain make manual planning genuinely unworkable, when multi-echelon optimisation and probabilistic forecasting would deliver real value, and, crucially, only once your planning process and data are sound enough to build on. An APS amplifies a good operating model and accelerates a bad one.

Does an APS replace my ERP?

No. An APS sits above the ERP, draws on its data as the single source of truth, and feeds planning decisions back into it for execution. The two systems do different jobs and work together. You keep the ERP as your system of record and add the APS as your system of decision.

Should I sort out planning during an ERP migration?

Yes, an ERP migration such as a move to S/4HANA is the natural moment to design your planning layer deliberately, but do not assume the new ERP will close the planning gap on its own. A newer ERP is still a system of record, not a system of decision. Treat the ERP and the planning capability as related but distinct decisions, fix the data and process foundations first, and then decide whether an APS is justified.

Related reading: Supply Chain Planning: A Guide for Australia · How Advanced Planning Systems Transform Supply Chain Planning · How to Improve Demand Forecasting Accuracy · S&OP That Actually Works in Australia