A seamless journey with Blue Sky
In the fast-paced world of retail, staying ahead of consumer demand is crucial. Blue Sky’s Demand Forecasting Service offers a streamlined solution that brings rapid returns on investment (ROI) without heavy upfront investments or requiring your team to have specialized knowledge in forecasting, data science, and statistics. Our Analytics as a Service is designed to make the onboarding process effortless for retailers, allowing them to leverage advanced demand forecasting quickly.
Overview
Blue Sky’s Demand Forecasting Service is engineered to simplify demand forecasting for retailers. By taking full charge of implementation, operation, and maintenance, our team ensures that retailers receive accurate demand forecasts weekly. The service measures and improves accuracy automatically and is billed on a flexible month-to-month subscription model without having to commit long-term.
Advantages
Single Point of Reference
With Blue Sky, you receive scientifically calculated and highly accurate demand forecasts weekly to support inventory-related decision-making across your entire company.
Advanced Security and Easy Integration
Data security is a top priority. Outputs are provided in CSV format and transferred via encrypted channels such as sFTP and secure protocol, ensuring your data remains protected.
Optional Validation Screen
Blue Sky offers a dedicated online user interface for businesses to review outcomes, make adjustments, and run real-time simulations. This interface includes built-in KPIs, alerts, and charts, allowing for detailed data analysis and simulations.
Benefits
- Informed Decision-Making: Support your business with accurate data for sales and inventory target calculations, key-value item assessment, and pricing strategy deployment.
- Maximized Profitability: Achieve optimal inventory levels and maximize profitability with precise inventory allocation that meets demand without excessive stock levels.
- Enhanced Agility: Respond with agility and speed to evolving consumer demands and changing market conditions, enhancing your competitive edge.
Approach
- Historical Data Utilization: Forecasts are generated based on historical data, with the capability to leverage product and location attributes.
- New Item/Location Mapping: Seamlessly map new items and locations into the forecasting model with AI tools assisting to identify relevant demand patterns.
- Lifecycle Management: Handle both long and short-lifecycle product demand forecasting pre and in season.
- Floating Event Management: Manage demand around floating events such as Easter and promotions.
- Broad data integration: In addition to sales data, additional information about promotions, stock levels, availability constraints, attributes and weather are leveraged to increase forecast accuracy.
Integration with ERP Systems
Data to and from ERP systems is integrated and exchanged automatically. Validation is executed automatically with built in reporting alerting for discrepancies. During delivery cadence, all raised anomalies are reviewed by our forecasting experts and discussed with client business teams as necessary.
Next Step: Run a free proof of concept
Kickstart your journey to more accurate inventory by experiencing our demand forecast service for free! All you need to do is sign up and share two years of historical data with our experts, after which Blue Sky will conduct an initial analysis, provide feedback on data congruency and share back the demand forecasts. This exercise lasts six weeks and begins upon receipt and confirmation of historical data integrity.
Conclusion
Blue Sky’s Demand Forecasting offers a straightforward onboarding process for demand forecasting, enabling retailers to achieve quick ROI without the need for specialized in-house expertise. Embrace our analytics as a service to enhance your decision-making capabilities quickly, optimize inventory levels accurately, and stay agile in a dynamically changing retail environment. Start your POC forecasting analysis exercise with Blue Sky today and unlock the potential of precise demand forecasting for your business.