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Demand Forecast

Forecast the future demand for your products at your preferred granularity. Define your time horizon and look into the future to optimize stock allocation, optimize pricing strategies, and much more.

This project offers a plug-and-play solution allowing retail analytics teams to forecast the demand of products over a period of time. With easy tailoring of the project through a Dataiku Application and the capacity to adjust the data flow to their needs, the Demand Forecast solution enables retail companies to optimize sourcing and production planning, inventory management, pricing, and marketing strategies, and much more. More details on the specifics of the solution can be found on the knowledge base. This solution is available on installed instances and Dataiku Online.

 

Business Overview

Predicting how your business will behave in the future, whether being short, medium, or long-term is hard. Yet, it is critical for all companies to have the ability to forecast future trends in a reliable manner to answer a broad range of strategic questions – ie.:

  • What will be the best sellers in 3 months?
  • Why are the sales of some products declining?
  • To which areas should the products be shipped to? In which quantities?
  • How should I adjust my product purchasing strategy? 
  • Which marketing channels can help boost product purchases?
  • Which discounts and special offers resonate with online visitors?

In order to answer those questions, companies should be able to plan for future trends: how? By leveraging Demand Forecast. With this approach, use historical data and personalized sets of parameters (discounts, holidays, marketing events etc.) in order to predict purchase patterns at the individual product level as well as what quantity and value this will amount to. While not a perfect science, Demand Forecast will be a key asset to optimize sourcing and production planning, inventory management, pricing and marketing strategies, and much more.

Highlights

  • Input the Demand Forecast required datasets: transactions, Products/SKUs (Stock Keeping Units), seasonality, store locations, and online/offline events (e.g holidays, marketing, etc.)
  • Define the solution settings through a user-friendly Dataiku App: input data, data mapping (transaction date, transaction identifier, price management, etc.), forecast specifications (granularity, time horizon, lookback window), Products/SKUs feature engineering, and calendar events feature engineering
  • Consume the output and forecast the demand of specific product/SKU categories through an interactive webApp and dashboards
  • Rerun the entire data pipeline on new data using a simple application
  • Automate the pipeline to rebuild with new/fresh data
Solution available on Dataiku Online