Excerpt Reprinted With Permission from
the AMR Research Alert on Supply Chain Management
Baxter Planning System Does Service Parts Planning
(November 20, 2000) - Within the Capital Equipment, Electronics, Telecommunications,
and Service-oriented industries, a responsive and integrated service parts
planning process is a fundamental consideration for overall Supply Chain Management
(SCM). Service parts planning has historically been a sleepy market, but lately
it has seen a resurgence of customer interest. With overall business emphasizing
the customer more, as well as a focus on the interaction and retention of customers,
the challenge of effective service parts planning becomes critical to all sizes
of companies. Today, not only do the large companies have application choices
for supply chain and service parts planning, but midsize companies also have
a menu of vendors from which to chose.
Baxter Planning Systems is one such vendor. Founded in 1993, the small company
gets its name from its President and CEO, Greg Baxter. He spent 20 years developing
and managing service parts planning systems. For his current management team,
Baxter brought together more than 100 people-years of service parts management
experience. The company's principal investor is Ray Thurston. He serves as
chairman and brings significant perspectives from his previous senior management
positions for Sonic Air, which he founded, and UPS Logistics.
Six of Baxter's products are bundled together in what the company terms as
its Prophet product suite. The bundled applications are Site Planning, Distribution
Planning, Product Forecasting, Material Forecasting, Supply Planning, and Staff
Planning. The suite handles distribution planning; namely the planning of service
parts to the right place at the right time. Indeed the heart of the Baxter
system is its site planning and replenishment functionality. It has the ability
to manage prioritized replenishment based on a proprietary Service Profitability
Index.
Baxter's original customer was Hewlett Packard's (HP) service organization.
Therefore, many of the product suite's features and functionality address the
problems of short product lifecycles, such as the need for product lifecycle
forecasting, new product introduction, and end-of-support life planning. The
Baxter applications are also different than others on the market, because they
can provide data on the cost of stock-outs, as well as proper logistics network
configuration. In addition to HP, the Baxter installed clients list includes
Agilent, Network Appliance, Enterisys, and UPS Logistics. --Bob Ferrari
