The New Reality for Service Leaders
Service leaders today are navigating a landscape that has never been more complex with tighter margins, unpredictable demand, workforce shortages, and escalating customer expectations have converged into what we call the Service Experience Storm. In this environment, balancing service excellence with cost efficiency has become a constant struggle.
As Marc Holliday, Director of Product Marketing at Baxter Planning, opened during our recent webinar:
“CFOs love us because we significantly reduce inventory carrying costs. Service executives love us because they can see everything across the entire Service Supply Chain. And planners love us because we help them make smarter decisions every day.”
For more than 30 years, Baxter Planning has partnered with global enterprises to turn those challenges into opportunities by empowering service organizations to transform their operations, elevate customer satisfaction, and achieve measurable business outcomes through intelligent, data-driven planning.
At the heart of this transformation is the BaxterPredict platform, the only purpose-built, end-to-end Service Supply Chain solution that unifies service parts planning, service order execution, and issue resolution in one system.
The Service Planning Challenge
Service organizations typically come to Baxter Planning from one of two places:
- Spreadsheet chaos: where manual planning leads to reactive decision-making and hidden inefficiencies.
- ERP frustration: where millions have been invested in systems designed for forward supply chains, not the unique, nonlinear demands of Service Supply Chain operations.
Neither approach provides the agility or visibility needed to operate confidently in today’s dynamic service environment. What service leaders need instead is an intelligent planning foundation that continuously learns, adapts, and delivers insight across every echelon of the Service Supply Chain.
That’s precisely what the BaxterPredict platform provides.
An End-to-End Platform Built for the Service Supply Chain
The BaxterPredict platform ingests and normalizes data from across your ecosystem from suppliers and repair centers to forward stocking locations and technician trunks and applies AI and automation to create optimized service part plans that balances service levels, costs, and sustainability goals.
Through a unified interface, service leaders, planners, IT teams, and customer support organizations can all see the same data creating transparency, faster collaboration, and smarter decision-making across the business.
At the core of the platform is Service Parts Planning, powered by BaxterProphet, which orchestrates every element of the service network through a proprietary methodology called Total Cost Optimization (TCO).
Total Cost Optimization: The Foundation of Smart Planning
Albert Palau Baiges, Senior Product Manager for Baxter Planning, explained during the webinar:
“Most planning systems force you to choose a service level and hope it balances your costs. That’s not true optimization. Our TCO model finds the correct service level automatically so you truly minimize total cost of service”.
Generic planning systems require you to set arbitrary service level targets and hope they balance your costs. But as Albert emphasized, that’s not true optimization.
Instead, Total Cost Optimization models both service and cost dynamically to determine the right service level for every part and location. It ensures that you minimize total cost across your network while still meeting or exceeding your service obligations.
And the results speak for themselves:
- Service levels improve by an average of 17%
- Inventory is reduced by an average 18%
- Planners spend less time firefighting and more time improving performance
Optimization Across Every Level of the Service Supply Chain
The BaxterPredict platform delivers continuous optimization across all stages of the Service Supply Chain from distribution centers to technicians in the field.
- Distribution Center Planning
Your distribution centers are the heartbeat of your Service Supply Chain. BaxterPredict ensures they always carry the right parts at the right time. Using advanced statistical and AI-powered forecasting methods designed specifically for Service Parts Planning, the system:
- Generates accurate demand forecasts for each material and site
- Calculates cost-optimized safety stock levels
- Creates daily replenishment recommendations based on demand, lead times, and service goals
- Alerts planners proactively to demand spikes or anomalies through management by exception dashboards
The result: service performance that stays on track even as market conditions shift.
- Repair and Return Planning
Many service organizations derive as much as 75% of their supply through repair and refurbishment. BaxterPredict’s repair planning capabilities optimize this critical process to reduce costs and improve sustainability.
“Repairing an asset you already own costs between 10% and 50% of buying new and it’s great for the environment. Our system dynamically forecasts returns, calculates repair yields, and integrates warranty and purchase planning to minimize new buys.”
This means fewer unnecessary purchases, faster part availability, and measurable progress toward sustainability goals: a win for your business, customers, and the planet.
- Field Planning
Getting the right part to the right place at the right time is the ultimate test of service performance. BaxterPredict’s field planning algorithms ensure optimal stocking levels across depots, lockers, and technician-held inventory.
Through the Backlog Criticality Index (BCI), the system prioritizes shipments to minimize operational costs while meeting SLAs reducing reliance on expensive next-flight-out deliveries and ensuring synchronized stocking across multiple echelons.
“We don’t just guess the right service level our algorithms determine it automatically. That’s how you maintain high availability while minimizing total cost.”
- Technician Planning
Technicians aren’t warehouses. They’re mobile, dynamic, and constrained by space. BaxterPredict understands this. Its technician inventory optimization ensures that only high-use, high-impact parts are stocked on service vans and that parts are intelligently shared across territories.
This leads to higher first-time fix rates, faster response times, and greater efficiency without overburdening technicians with unnecessary stock.
Bringing AI into the Service Lifecycle
Mike Ross, Baxter Planning’s Principal Product strategist, shared:
“We’re always innovating to make planning more automated, more predictive, and more productive. That’s what our use of AI is all about.”
Two innovations stand out:
- Lifecycle Intelligence
Using AI, BaxterProphet, a modular service parts planning product part of the BaxterPredict platform, enhances forecast accuracy at the most challenging stages of the product lifecycle: New Product Introduction (NPI) and End of Life (EOL).
By analyzing historical product growth and decline curves, it learns from similar parts and applies that knowledge to current products resulting in up to 15% better forecast accuracy for Last Time Buy decisions.
This empowers Service Supply Chain leaders to confidently invest in the right inventory levels for emerging products while avoiding costly excess at end-of-life.
- Budget Planning
Budget constraints are a reality in every organization. BaxterPredict’s new Budget Planning module allows service leaders to set purchase spend limits while maintaining service level thresholds.
The system automatically adjusts stocking targets to stay within budget and provides clear reporting to communicate trade-offs between financial objectives and service impact.
“If you’re cutting orders manually, you’re probably hurting service performance more than necessary. Our budget logic optimizes spend while preserving your ability to meet SLAs.”
This data-driven alignment between finance and service creates clarity, accountability, and smarter operational choices.
Management by Exception: Turning Data into Action
With thousands of parts and locations to manage, planners can’t manually monitor everything. BaxterPredict’s service part planning product prioritizes the issues that matter most by guiding planners to the highest-impact actions first.
Each alert is cost-ranked by potential service and financial impact, giving planners a daily to-do list that focuses their attention where it drives real results.
For leaders, it’s a powerful lever for improving planner productivity and ensuring that decisions align with strategic business goals.
Advanced Analytics for Service Supply Chain Intelligence
BaxterPredict includes purpose-built analytics dashboards designed specifically for Service Supply Chains not generic manufacturing metrics.
Service leaders can track performance across:
- Fill rate and service level trends
- Inventory velocity and excess
- Planner workload and alert resolution rates
- Budget compliance and spend optimization
All dashboards are interactive and drillable giving you both the big picture and the operational details you need to make confident, informed decisions.
Planning as a Service: Partnership for Performance
Technology is only as powerful as the people using it. That’s why Baxter Planning complements its platform with Planning as a Service (PaaS): a consultative model that pairs your organization with Baxter Planning’s expert planners.
“This isn’t outsourcing. Our planners work alongside your team helping you maximize adoption, accelerate ROI, and continuously improve performance.”
Through weekly meetings, KPI reviews, and best-practice guidance, Baxter Planning’s experts provide hands-on support tailored to your operational goals.
They also lead strategic initiatives like:
- Network redesigns and 3PL evaluations
- Last Time Buy strategies
- Excess reduction and redeployment optimization
- Resilience planning during market disruptions
The result? Faster time-to-value, better service outcomes, and measurable cost savings.
Continuous Improvement Through Partnership
PaaS isn’t just support. It’s an ongoing partnership that evolves with your business.
Baxter Planning planners provide scorecards that measure your planning maturity, benchmark performance against best practices, and identify areas for strategic improvement.
Clients that adopt Planning as a Service consistently achieve:
- Higher service performance at lower cost
- Greater planner productivity
- Stronger cross-functional collaboration
Or as Mike put it:
“Our customers call us service supply chain experts because we’re right there beside them, helping them succeed every step of the way.”
Proven Business Impact
The business results from Baxter Planning’s approach are compelling:
- One customer saved $11 million in excess inventory by redefining redeployment rules.
- Another fully automated its PO management process, freeing planners to focus on strategic work instead of repetitive administrative tasks.
- On average, Baxter clients see 35% lower carrying costs, 25% higher first-time fix rates, and 40% more productive planning teams.
These aren’t theoretical outcomes. They’re measurable, repeatable results achieved by some of the world’s most innovative service organizations.
See ahead. Stay ahead.
For today’s Service Supply Chain Leaders, the question isn’t whether to digitize and automate: it’s how to do it intelligently, sustainably, and profitably.
The BaxterPredict platform gives you the visibility, intelligence, and control you need to lead with confidence:
- Unified data and analytics for smarter decision-making
- AI-powered optimization across the entire Service Supply Chain
- Proactive exception management that turns insight into action
- Trusted partnership through Planning as a Service
In an era defined by disruption, agility and foresight have become the ultimate competitive advantages. With Baxter Planning, you don’t just respond to change, you anticipate it.
