Five Steps Hanesbrands Used to Win Planner Trust Over the Spreadsheet

How much of your adoption rollout plan covers the part where teams decide to trust the platform?

Budget, demos, and security review all go into picking the platform, and adoption tends to get left to look after itself.

Hemant Ramaswami spent five years on the other side of that. As Vice President of Global Supply Chain Transformation at Hanesbrands (now a Gildan company), he’ll tell you the hardest part was change management.

Fair enough, from where his teams sat. They ran the process daily and trusted their Excel files and the emails that carried the information.

The systems underneath gave them little choice. Demand planning ran in one place, supply planning in another, and spreadsheets bridged the two. Answering something as ordinary as when a product would be available meant a service rep had to build the answer by hand.

Hanesbrands was among the earliest enterprise adopters of Logility Orchestration Center. The company proved it on one product line before asking anyone else to change how they worked.

What follows is his account of how that went.

How Hanesbrands Sequenced the Rollout

Five steps, and the criteria behind each one that are worth borrowing.

Step 1: Pick the Segment That Proves the Math Fastest

Hanesbrands started with men’s underwear. Large volume, highly profitable, and a far simpler portfolio to work with than women’s underwear or activewear.

Each attribute speaks to a different audience. Volume and profit make the results visible to leadership, since a win on a marginal line won’t earn a second round of funding. A contained portfolio makes the results verifiable by people using it, so when the numbers look off, the team can quickly trace the cause while still learning the platform. Come up short on either count, and your first outcome turns into something to argue about.

“So we took a simple business where it was high revenue, low complexity, and we were able to prove the value of the platform very quickly.”—Hemant Ramaswami, VP of Supply Chain Digital Transformation at Hanesbrands

Asked where a company starting today should begin, Hemant offers two entry points. If a problem is already brewing somewhere, start there, because you’ll have attention and urgency on your side. If nothing is on fire, pick something manageable, and let the results speak for themselves.

Step 2: Put Risk to Plan in Front of Customer Service and Sales

The first capability they built is the Fulfillment Master, and it answers one question: what is our risk to the plan this month or this quarter?

Two groups read that risk differently. Customer service manages the monthly and quarterly deliveries. Sales reads revenue risk and decides which accounts to engage directly, measured against the number already committed to leadership.

“It answers what our risk to the plan is,” Hemant says. “You can see the status of each order, what is covered by the inventory we already have on hand, what’s going to come up, and what’s already in transit.”

That’s the shift worth noting. Teams stop reporting what happened and start working on what’s about to happen, while there’s still time to act. A rep who knows a gap is coming can call the account first to offer something equivalent, so the shopper who walks in still finds a product to buy.

Step 3: Define the AI’s Role Before Concerns Arise

The question about artificial intelligence (AI) came up while they were still building the system.

Hemant’s team didn’t wait to be asked. They told people directly that the AI was there to enable them.

“There was some concern about AI,” Hemant says, “but we were clear that the AI was not there to replace them; it was there to enable them.”

What settled it was something concrete. Select a flagged exception in the Fulfillment Master, and it lists the SKUs and the customers behind it. Customer reps reach the account proactively instead of spending time running the lookup first. Less time spent as data engineers, more time on the judgment calls they were hired to make.

Relief from work nobody wanted to do landed harder than any assurance of job security.

Step 4: Run In Parallel and Resolve Every Discrepancy

Teams kept working on their Excel files alongside the platform for several cycles. Nobody took the spreadsheets away.

Every difference between the two became an opportunity to walk through the data, understand the discrepancy, and show why the platform’s number held up.

“Whenever there were differences, Hemant says, “we could demonstrate to them why the data and the platform were more accurate or better than what they were getting through the old process.”

The distribution centers ran their own version of the same exercise. Some sites handle 30 to 40 containers a day with limited dock time, and corporate used to run the analysis and send each site a file. Once the ranking lived in the platform, dock teams could see why a container ranked high, not just that it did.

Seeing the reasoning behind a priority is what moved them.

Step 5: Expand Into Harder Categories, Then Let Adoption Spread

Activewear came next, and was a harder problem on every axis. It carried a wider size and colorway matrix, seasonal drops within the line itself, and more SKUs. It also had a wider customer base, including boutique accounts with limited capability to manage orders on their own.

By then, the team wasn’t selling anything internally. Customer ops groups watched partners in other businesses working from the platform and started asking to be included.

“As we demonstrated the success in men’s underwear and started looking at other categories, the adoption really spread organically,” Hemant notes.

“Trust isn’t mandated. It doesn't just come because somebody tells you to trust the tool. It has to be earned, one decision at a time, one correct decision at a time.”—Hemant Ramaswami, VP of Supply Chain Digital Transformation at Hanesbrands

And adoption changed more than technology. Once sales, customer ops, customer service, and supply chain all worked from the same answer, the teams started talking to each other more freely. Questions stopped being about where a container was and started being about what to do next.

What Hanesbrands Built On, and Where It Sits Now

Hanesbrands ran all of this on an AI-powered Orchestration Center that covers order fulfillment, supply, manufacturing, logistics, and inventory. Following Aptean’s acquisition, that capability now sits within Logility’s Orchestration Center.

Aptean provides purpose-built, industry-specific software for manufacturers and distributors, spanning enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain planning, and execution systems. Demand, supply, manufacturing, and transportation all run on systems built for how those operations actually work.

Orchestration Center sits above them. It actively detects supply chain problems as they arise and uses AI agents to suggest and implement resolutions. If something requires a human decision, the agent flags it and explains why, so teams can understand and trust the suggestion. This keeps people in charge, helps fix problems faster, and keeps the supply chain working well.

What that layer enables across your organization:

• One answer across functions. Sales, customer ops, customer service, and supply chain work from the same coverage picture, shifting the conversation from locating a problem to resolving it.

• A forward view planners can act on. Coverage across the next several months shows where it drops and when it recovers, which turns overtime, expedites, and air freight into planned decisions.

• Work ranked by what it actually fulfills. Inbound containers are prioritized by the demand the goods on board would satisfy, so dock teams open the ones that release orders.

Aptean builds its AI around how supply chains actually operate, down to how a container, an order line, and an allocation relate to each other.

Wherever your operation starts, the goal is the same one Hemant was working toward: one version of the truth everyone trusts, and a team spending its time on decisions while the system assembles the data.

Watch the full session with Hemant Ramaswami, or talk with our supply chain team about where to start your adoption rollout.