What are the different demand forecasting techniques? Introduction Demand forecasting is the process of predicting future sales by using historical data to make informed business decisions about everything from inventory planning, and warehousing needs to running promotions and meeting customer expectations. Demand forecasting helps the business estimate the total sales...

What I learnt in first two years of Agile Implementation Numerous agile frameworks are available in the market today, each one claiming to help implementation of common agile principles in different forms and manner. We, at BluePi, started our official agile journey almost 2 years back. Before that, agility was...

Customer Role in Agile Projects Three Pillars of Agile Agile projects especially projects following Scrum Methodology depends on co-ordination and communication of three important roles in the project, namely, Product Owner, Scrum Team and Scrum Master. Product Owner Product Owner looks after the scope of the project and that team...

Role of third party data in a customer data platform If there is one sector that has remained buoyant despite the global pandemic, it is online commerce. Brick and mortar players are also a significant shift in revenue streams, and omnichannel presence is a necessity. The changes in the retail...

What is demand forecasting in Retail Defining Demand Forecasting Demand forecasting as the term suggests is predicting the need for a product in the near future. Take a simple example - “World petrol demand likely to peak by 2030 as electric car sales rise” as said by The Guardian about...

Forecast new product success scientifically A new product is launched in the market to reduce the inflation cost of production by making improvements on existing products, targeted to the current market needs. New products are launched by introducing area-specific changes to extend the market space. New Products permit organizations to...

A use case for what-if tool - Long horizon forecasting example The need for long-horizon forecasting Long-horizon forecasting involves predicting a situation 1.5-2 years in advance. Some businesses need such horizons for procurement of raw materials, ensuring the availability of staff and labour to meet demand and supply, expense management...

COVID-19 impact on the retail industry While COVID-19 spreads globally, the retail industry braces for the outbreak’s fallout. From the slowdown in sales at the moment to not being able to move inventory and an increase in demand from the consumer market, here’s everything you need to know about the...

Factors to keep in mind while Forecasting A famous quote coined by Paul Saffo, a consultant associate professor at Stanford University who has been a technology forecaster for more than 35 years now, says that- “The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what...

Inventory rebalancing - Part 2 In part 1, we built a crucial foundation to understand problem of inventory imbalance. Here, in part 2, we will dig deeper into the solution to the presented problem and how we can implement the presented solution in practice with a set of business constraints....

Confidence Intervals What are the confidence intervals? In statistics, it is almost always impossible to deal with the entire population as a whole. When I say population, I mean considering each and every possible value of a variable under consideration - be it sales of a commodity or the number...

Inventory rebalancing Introduction Any retail chain organisation, operating multiple stores across multiple states and cities, and sometimes in multiple countries, has to optimise its supply chain to meet varying customer demand. Outline Why does inventory imbalance happen? How to identify inventory imbalance across stores? Imbalance metrics Why does inventory imbalance...

Product recommendations using HRNN E-commerce websites are a common goto destination for us and thus we all are very well aware of the importance of recommendations provided by them. We find recommendation engines almost everywhere, be it Amazon, Netflix, Facebook or LinkedIn. Amazon uses it for product recommendation, Netflix for...

About AI In Supply Chain Optimization Artificial Intelligence (AI), defined by Gartner as a technology that “applies advanced analysis and logic-based techniques, including machine learning (ML), to interpret events, support and automate decisions, and take actions,”. is attracting a lot of attention right now as companies grapple with a skilled...

AI models impact on retail sales Modern industrial sales and supply chains are complex. The amount of a product or service that a company can sell or produce over a given time frame is often negatively impacted by operational bottlenecks that might occur due to a number of reasons. In...

Demand forecasting solutions using machine learning A Gartner survey indicates that demand volatility is the top pain point for business executives - irrespective of the industry they are in. It indicates how the demand forecasting has become a critical part of growth strategies for businesses. According to the Institute of...

Customer Data Platform WHAT IS CDP? The term CDP stands for Customer Data Platform. CDP is defined as a packaged software that centralizes customer data from all sources and then makes this data available to other systems for marketing campaigns, customer service and all customer experience initiatives. The types of...

Stockouts - causes and how to avoid them StockOuts and Why It Happens According to wiki, A stockout, or out-of-stock (OOS) event is an event that causes inventory to be exhausted. In layman terms, it means unavailability of the product when customer want to purchase it. Stockout is an opposite...

Retail Stock Management Techniques For New-Age Retailers No business has ever become successful with ineffective retail stock management. Take the biggest of names in the industry and the statement holds true. Walmart lost a whopping $3 billion because its retail stock management went wrong and the most in-demand inventory went...

Retail Analytics Why it is important for retail inventory optimization and more The competition in retail is increasing by the day. No matter which industry you’re in or what products you’re offering, the key to achieving retail success is to become more data-centric. Be it marketing, retail stock management or...

Best practices of Demand forecasting in retail Best practices for smarter predictions Demand forecasting retail is one of the toughest jobs. One has to look into the existing market data, store performance, marketing performance, the changing patterns of the target market and more to be able to predict consumer behavior...

ML in supply chain optimization How ML in supply chain optimization is improving management and efficiency Machine learning is one technology that has revolutionizing industries by helping optimize their day to day processes. One such segment where the technology has made its mark is supply chain optimization and management. ML...