The days of simply creating a “set it and forget it” demand forecasting algorithm are gone. Today’s turbulent times demand adaptation and continuous adjustment. But it’s not enough to think about lower forecast error; you need to translate these adjustments into better business outcomes by thinking beyond sophistication to orchestration across your organization.
Our Demand Forecasting Center of Excellence believes that better data beats better algorithms. With this principle in mind, we use your company’s historical and near–real-time data to predict consumers’ behaviors and attitudes, while also bringing external data to the mix—think online searches, smartphone mobility data, and social media posts.
Demand forecasting is a change management effort as well as a technical one, so we also focus on the human element. By designing user-friendly interfaces and providing extensive staff training, we ensure that your teams have the skills they need to produce and interpret reliable forecasts, as well as to understand and apply them.
Since many of these forecasts are part of automated pipelines that produce thousands or even millions of individual predictions, forecasting is often as much a software engineering challenge as a statistical one. Our software engineering teams ensure that computational efficiency is fully addressed so that you don’t get surprised by your cloud computing bills.
Another key decision when considering demand forecasting is “build vs. buy.” In order to supplement the early prototyping efforts to improve your forecast pipeline, we maintain a database of requirements and relevant vendors to help you through this important choice.
Finally, consistency counts. We reconcile demand forecasting across every facet of your organization, encompassing operations as wide-ranging as research and development, consumer pricing, and network optimization. By doing this we ensure that all of your operations are as smart as any of your individual efforts, today and well into the future.