Kinaxis Maestro™ promises a lot for inventory management: simulate changes to inventory policy, weigh the trade-off between on-time delivery, revenue risk and cost, and give planners a real-time view of exactly where stock is exposed. On paper, an organisation running Maestro™ should never be firefighting a stock-out or a write-off again.
In practice, the platform going live is rarely where the return comes from. It comes from planners trusting the system enough to actually work through it, rather than working around it - and that only happens when adoption is planned for as deliberately as the technology is.
Volvo Cars: a rollout built around people from the start
Volvo Cars runs one of the more complex supply chains in the automotive sector. The business builds petrol, hybrid and fully-electric models side by side, from production sites in Europe, the US and China, into more than 100 countries. In 2024, fully-electric models made up 23% of Volvo's sales, with plug-in hybrids making up a further 23% - a product mix that makes traditional, sequential planning very difficult to sustain.
Volvo selected Kinaxis Maestro™ to move away from sequential, constraint-focused planning toward a more agile, data-driven model. What is notable is what ran alongside the platform rollout, not just the platform itself: Volvo launched a dedicated change management and training programme with Grange, including foundational supply chain planning training, hands-on platform familiarisation and team-building work - all completed before the 20-week planning phase began.
"A concurrent planning engine nobody trusts yet still gets bypassed with a spreadsheet on a Friday afternoon."
That sequencing matters. The benefits the rollout was built to deliver - faster decisions, better visibility to allocate inventory, fewer write-offs and higher planner productivity - only show up once planners are confident enough in the new process to rely on it under pressure.
The pattern holds beyond one rollout
This is not unique to the automotive sector. Kinaxis has reported that First Solar improved its inventory turns by 20% after adopting Maestro's forecasting and stock-out avoidance capability - a result that depends on planners actively using the tool's predictive output, not simply having access to it.
improvement in inventory turns at First Solar after adopting Maestro's forecasting and stock-out avoidance capability. (Kinaxis)
The consistent thread: inventory software can calculate the right answer. Whether an organisation acts on it depends on whether the people making daily decisions trust the system enough to follow it instead of falling back on the old process.
Where this leaves adoption
Adoption is not a training exercise that happens after go-live. It is the layer that decides whether an expensive platform investment turns into measurable value, or into another system that looks live on paper while the business quietly reverts to the old ways of working.
The adoption gap typically shows up as:
- Planners running parallel spreadsheets alongside the system
- Low confidence in system outputs, leading to manual overrides
- Inconsistent process adoption across teams or regions
- Value realisation tracking that quietly disappears after go-live
That is the part Grange focuses on: not the technology decision, but making sure the investment behind it actually lands - planners working differently every day, decisions moving faster, and the return the business planned for actually showing up in the numbers.
Is your adoption where it needs to be?
If your organisation is partway through a Maestro™ rollout and adoption feels like the part most likely to stall, a risk-free diagnostic is the lowest-risk way to see where that gap sits before committing further.
We work with planning teams to assess where confidence, process consistency and system trust are falling short - and what it takes to close that gap.
Talk to us about closing the adoption gap on your Maestro™ rollout →
Sources
Manufacturing Digital - How Volvo & Kinaxis are Transforming Manufacturing Planning
Supply Chain Digital - How Kinaxis Helps Volvo Modernise Supply Chain Planning
Kinaxis - Inventory Management solution overview and customer outcomes (First Solar reference)