After Nine Years of Customization, Lippert Chose a Different Kind of Supply Chain Platform

Every long-tenured enterprise technology platform eventually reaches a crossroads. A system that once met the needs of the business can, after years of investment, customization, and changing requirements, become exponentially more difficult to adapt. The question is no longer simply, “Does it still work?” It becomes, “Can it do what the business needs today—and how steep will the climb be to get there?”  

Lippert, a global manufacturer of highly engineered components for the RV, marine, automotive, commercial vehicle, and building products industries, reached that crossroads after 9 years of using its supply chain planning platform. The company had invested heavily in customizing that system to fit its business, and it had worked. But Lippert's planning team had started asking a different question: not whether the platform could keep doing what it had always done, but whether it could adapt fast enough for what came next.

That question led Lippert to ketteQ.

Built to Match, Not to Settle

Lippert didn't go looking for a leap of faith. Its evaluation requirements were built to establish parity with the incumbent system, item by item, and ketteQ met every one of them across several structured demonstrations.

That is a familiar shape for legacy replacement decisions. The challenger has to prove it can do everything the old system does before anyone will seriously consider whether it can do more.

The Moment the Evaluation Changed

But the most revealing moment in Lippert’s evaluation wasn’t even part of the evaluation.

In a later session, the Lippert team watched Quintus™, ketteQ’s Free-Range AI™, reason through alive discussion that no one had scripted or prepared in advance. There was no rehearsed demo path and no predetermined answer or actions. Quintus was confronted with something new and worked through it in real time, leveraging a fleet of agents to reason, learn, and adjust.

“When we built our evaluation requirements, we were looking for a platform that could match what we already had,” said Ben-Marvin Egel, VP of Supply Chain Planning & Governance at Lippert. “Watching Quintus™ reason through a live question, one nobody had prepared for, showed us the potential to combine advanced planning capabilities with a new level of AI-native decision support for Lippert's complex business.”

That moment reframed the entire evaluation. Parity had been the entry requirement. What Lippert selected was something built for a different way of working altogether, one that an AI-native architecture enables via automatic dispatch through to a fleet of bots able to reason and take action. Rather than trying to force a legacy system to do something it was not designed for and that would require massive reconfiguration, they chose to leverage a modern AI-first system that grows with them.

“This decision was about more than replacing a system we had outgrown,” said Scott Meiner, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Lippert. “It was about putting a faster, more responsive AI-native planning foundation in place, one that strengthens our planning capabilities, supports faster decision-making, and provides a foundation for future innovation as quickly as our business moves.”

What Nine Years of Customization Actually Costs

The real cost of a heavily customized legacy platform rarely shows up as a single failure. It shows up as friction: every new requirement needs a workaround; every process change needs someone to rebuild the configuration underneath it. Lippert's planning team wasn't dealing with a broken system. They were dealing with one that had gotten harder to bend.

For Lippert, that translates into an open, AI-native architecture that grows with them and is built to enhance visibility, learn and adjust to support scalable planning processes, and reduce the need for the kind of ongoing, hardened in-place customizations that defined its lastnine years. It also positions the company as an early mover in AI-enabled supply chain planning within its industry, something Lippert's leadership sees as a competitive advantage rather than a nice-to-have.

“Lippert's evaluation identified an opportunity to adopt a platform that aligns closely with its future vision for AI-enabled supply chain planning,” said Mike Landry, CEO of ketteQ. “Lippert's decision to partner with ketteQ and Quintus™ highlights a move toward AI-native architecture, not AI bolted onto a system that was never designed for it.”

Freeing Planners for the Work That Actually Needs Them

The most immediate impact Lippert expects isn't strategic. It's operational. As routine, high-volume planning and purchasing work becomes increasingly automated, Lippert's planning team gains room to focus on the decisions that require human judgment: the exceptions, the trade-offs, the moments where speed matters more than process.

That's the pattern showing up across companies making this same move. Not a wholesale reinvention of supply chain planning, but a shift in where human attention goes once the routine work stops requiring it.

From Parity to Possibility

Lippert's evaluation started with a straightforward ask: match what we already have. It ended with the company recognizing that the more interesting question wasn't whether a new platform could replicate nine years of customization. It was what became possible once a planning system could reason through problems no one had thought to script for it.

Read the Lippert press release to learn more.