Unveiling Baxter Planning: The Origin Story
The Beginning of Baxter Planning
The year was 1993. Jurassic Park made movie goers think resurrecting dinosaurs might actually be possible, Whitney Houston hit number 1 on the billboards with her rendition of “I Will Always Love You,” and NASA lost contact with the Mars Observer spacecraft resulting in a failed mission to explore our neighboring planet.
During this pivotal pop culture period of the 90s, Greg Baxter worked as a service parts planner at Texas Instruments, and a notion kept nagging at him: “There has to be a better way.”
Inspired to Do More
At the time, service parts were planned by using binders filled with large reports that required the planner to flip through to find demand, inventory, orders, and more. It was exceedingly time-consuming and subject to errors as Greg and other planners would have to identify what to buy/repair with pen and paper.
Spreadsheets were a new concept at the time, and Greg saw potential. He started plugging the information into a spreadsheet with formulas and equations. As spreadsheets started to get more sophisticated, Greg quickly ran into the 768K memory maximum that they had at that time.
Introducing Service Parts Planning Software
During his professional career, Greg developed a deep understanding of how complex planning parts can be. After Texas Instruments sold its computer and printer divisions to HP, Greg came up with the idea of starting a company that focused exclusively on service parts planning with software.
He learned basic programming and eventually created a program that did service parts planning through calculations: forecasts, target stock levels, and orders. Starting a new company while supporting his young family certainly had its risks, but Greg learned how to manage cash flow early on out of necessity. The thought of automating the process of planning and execution was both exciting and energizing – a new frontier for parts planning.
The Baxter Planning journey was not without its bumps in the road. Greg acknowledged that he didn’t naturally embody the typical “salesperson” persona—a key trait for driving business growth. But Greg was still able to network and establish a couple of initial clients by addressing an unmet requirement in the market.
Restructuring, mergers, and acquisitions caused several setbacks early on, but persistence paid off as the young product, Prophet, spoke for itself and more clients signed on. As the company grew, another thought of Greg’s had potential to become reality, Planning as a Service.
He had witnessed firsthand how planners became distracted and lacked the time to address all the parts, leading to millions of dollars in losses for companies. By providing both software and expert planners, those companies would achieve considerable savings in expedited shipping, expired products, and more.
Planning as a Service joined Prophet in the Baxter Planning offerings, giving the company a well-rounded software + services approach, but also the need to hire more planners.
Greg learned the importance of finding, attracting, and retaining top talent. -this is why Baxter Planning is known for having the best subject matter experts in service parts planning, hands down. Many employees have been with the company for more than a decade, some spanning over 20 years.
Driving Forward: The Power of Continuous Innovation for Lasting Success
In recent years, Baxter Planning’s product offerings have evolved into a comprehensive platform known as BaxterPredict—the industry’s first end-to-end predictive Service Supply Chain platform. BaxterPredict integrates the capabilities of Prophet with our latest innovations, Lynx and Snapshot, delivering visibility, automation, insights, and control to enable truly connected supply chains across every workflow and transaction. We’ve advanced this platform by incorporating artificial intelligence through the introduction of Prophet.ai.
The team at Baxter Planning takes great pride in the company’s achievements—our growth, the strong partnerships we’ve built with clients, and the exceptional workplace we’ve cultivated. At the same time, we remain focused on the future and the opportunities ahead.
Guided by core values such as curiosity and passion and a drive for continuous improvement, we remain committed to advancing and innovating our service parts planning ecosystem.
Lindsey Rose
Senior Director, Global Marketing
Lindsey is the Senior Director of Global Marketing at Baxter Planning: running the company’s marketing activities like webinars, email communication, and you guessed it – the Baxter Planning Blog.
With more than ten years in B2B Marketing, Lindsey enjoys finding unique ways for a company to not only stand out but to bring true benefit to a company’s customers and the industry as a whole. She finds the Baxter Planning team especially amazing because of the deep passion and knowledge held by the subject matter experts and everyone at the company.
Lindsey stays plenty busy outside of work, spending time with her husband and their two children. They spend lots of time at playgrounds and going for walks with their dog.
