Kyle Burby — twenty-five years in supply chain across food & beverage, CPG and distribution. Now independent.
I've implemented three planning platforms — ToolsGroup, Netstock, E2open — and watched all three go live at companies that were still arguing about the number every month afterward. Plenty of mid-market companies have no platform at all and run the whole thing on spreadsheets. They land in the same place: nobody owns the call, the metrics mean something different in every room, and most of the week goes to pulling data, chasing confirmations and rebuilding reports that already exist. That's the part I fix. I write the code too, but that's the second half.
Settled Thursday in a forty-minute meeting. Nobody asked which building it should land in. The logic was recorded nowhere, and next month it starts over.
Who this is for
If you recognize your business in one of these, we should talk. If you don't, I'll tell you that on the first call rather than sell you a diagnostic.
$100M–$1B revenue · 3–20 DCs · tens of thousands of stocked SKUs
An ERP that suggests buys nobody trusts, so twenty buyers keep private spreadsheets. Inventory is simultaneously too high and out of stock on the items that matter. Nobody can say what fill rate is without three people disagreeing.
Scaling fast · no plant of its own · minimum runs, shelf life, promo volatility
Production is booked months out against a forecast that changes weekly. Minimum runs dwarf a month of demand, promotions arrive as a lift and leave as a writeoff, and the plan lives in a spreadsheet three people email around.
PE-owned · post-close or pre-exit · working capital in the thesis
The model assumed inventory turns that haven't materialized. The operating team is capable but has no planning infrastructure, and nobody can prove what the inventory is actually worth or which of it will never sell.
What I actually bring
Most of this work is not technical. It's designing the SIOP cadence, deciding who owns which call, defining the metrics so they mean one thing, and then standing in the room every month until the discipline holds. That's the product. But installed on its own it decays back to spreadsheets in two quarters — because the inputs still arrive late, by hand, from six different places. So I build the process and the pipeline underneath it: internal systems and outside signals landing on the same clock, every morning, without anyone touching them.
SIOP discipline × Synchronized data × Automation = Decisions nobody has to argue about
What the gap costs today
The rest goes to assembling inputs, chasing confirmations, rebuilding a view someone already built, and negotiating toward a consensus number. That isn't a people problem. It's what happens when the system doesn't produce an answer, so five people have to.
Proof, not claims
Everything below was built, shipped and used — not sketched for this site. Start wherever you're most skeptical.
Built, shipped, in use
As SVP of Supply Chain at a private-equity-owned national distributor — running transportation, DC operations, planning and procurement across an 8-warehouse network.
Buyers moved off personal spreadsheets and onto one planning workbench with a single shared version of the buy signal.
Suggested PO lines reviewed by an AI agent that surfaces only the exceptions worth a planner's attention.
Special-order items segmented by viability, ending item-by-item judgment calls on what to stock, drop or centralize.
Roughly $850k of annual run-rate savings modeled from right-sizing the buying team once the manual work came out of it — a hundred basis points of budgeted SG&A, from one function.
Stocked items each assigned an ABC/XYZ classification driving a seasonally adjusted statistical safety stock model — replacing a flat weeks-of-supply rule.
Fill rate definitions standardized enterprise-wide — line, unit and dollar — which ended the standing argument about whose number was right.
Next step
If that answer takes more than one sentence, there's an engagement here. An hour on a call is usually enough to know whether it's worth paying for.