Demand Forecasting PlanR

Retailers are under unprecedented pressure to plan and execute inventory across the business in a rapidly changing
environment. Forecasting consumer demand is a key step in anticipating inventory need in the business.

Challenges answered:

We have designed our consumer demand forecast service to provide retailers with the insight and information needed
to make educated decisions when planning inventory short term (3-5 months) and long term (12+ months).

Benefits:

  • They can be used to drive merchandise financial planning, assortment planning, allocation, replenishment and
    even pricing decisions.
  • Our service considers product and location attributes, new item/location mappings, long and short lifecycle
    products, floating event management (Easter, promotions etc.) and retail price.

Key features:

  • Quick to launch (4-8 weeks) and provides updated demand forecast refined on a weekly basis into a short and long
    term horizon. All we need from our retailer client is an initial 2 year sales history followed by weekly sharing
    of sales data. During the initial historical sales data load and during the weekly updates, our team follows up
    on open questions with the retailer business team to ensure that data is correct and validated. Future events
    such as future promotions and store closures are also shared and discussed.
  • Our service is built on a subscription model: it does not require costly solution selection or building and
    training a team to operate a solution. In a short time and without heavy investment, retailers benefit from a
    scientifically produced and continuously controlled demand forecast.

Solution overview:

Building an accurate consumer demand forecast is not easy however, especially when historical data has little similarity
to demand impacted by COVID lockdowns. In the event that forecasting is produced based in 2018 and 2019 historical data,
it is important to heavily factor in 2020 and 2021 since historical sales profile curves will likely look radically
different from 2019 to 2020 due to the dramatic impact of COVID lockdowns on retail results world-wide.

Try our service against your current demand forecasts: contact us to conduct a trial with our service teams. You only
have to share historical sales data and review with our team any open questions. After that, we send you a trial
forecast and you can measure its accuracy against actual sales data.