With a new IT strategy based on Microsoft, the regional subsidiary of a leading European manufacturing company followed the group strategy with Azure and Power BI and engaged ClearPeaks to design & deploy their new integrated cloud data platform.
At this point, users from various departments like sales, marketing, manufacturing & purchasing were using pre-existing Excel-based forecasting models that were not automated. This led to a slow-down of internal processes.
Also, better accuracies compared to naïve models (simple MA) were needed for the forecasting, to better plan for the supply and manufacturing timelines.
They wanted a forecasting tool/framework on top of their new integrated cloud data platform, which would automate the end-to-end process of accurately forecasting unit sales for their products, and an automated approval flow that would allow different business units to participate in the flow and perform modifications on forecasted data if required.
We trained each of the 1,600+ products in the client’s portfolio with a time series model to provide the monthly forecast for units sold over a 15-month rolling window. All this data was then written back to the database and presented in relevant Power BI dashboards.
The entire process of data ingestion, preparation and forecasting process was automated through a pipeline deployed using Azure Data Factory, Azure ML, and Azure Data Lake.
Power Apps and automated flows for users from Sales, Marketing, Manufacturing and Purchasing/Procurement teams to create fine tunings and validate forecast data.
With all this, our client now had an automated forecasting tool/framework which provides overall monthly sales forecasts for the next 15 months for over 1,600 products, and an automated approval flow that enables the various functions of the business to work together seamlessly.
The client significantly improved their manufacturing efficiency due to being able to estimate production needs better, based on the highly accurate forecasts.
They now have an enhanced ROI on their marketing efforts, through improved campaign and promotion design based on an in-depth understanding of their customers’ purchasing trends and patterns.
The rolling sales forecast solution forms the collective single point of reference for the Sales, Marketing, Purchasing and Manufacturing functions, which in turn enables further coherence and efficiency in end-to-end business process execution.
This increased efficiency has massively improved their relationships both with vendors and customers, and has a truly positive impact on their bottom line.
