Background
Forecasting is the process of using historical data to predict the future. It is commonly used to predict future sales or demand so that business can better plan for future events. Forecasting works by predicting numerical quantities for the future using observations from the past. Some of the common applications of forecasting on the OneClick.ai platform include Sales Forecasting and Customer Retention.
Challenge
One of the world’s top 10 dairy producers provides hundreds of products to hundreds of thousands of retail stores. A critical aspect of their business is coordinating their forecasting efforts to create efficiencies and increase profit margins. Prior to OneClick.ai, the company had a large team of analysts involved in building models to predict daily sales. With hundreds of different products and stores, there was an opportunity to use deep learning to improve the accuracy of the current methodology. Above and beyond the volume of SKUs, the company faced other challenges including:
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New products are constantly being produced, which have little historical data;
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Promotion/sales targets will affect sales;
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Seasonality;
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Competition between similar products;
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Marketing campaign effects are hard to capture by traditional sales forecasting models.
With these additional variables, it became too challenging for the current methodologies to accurately forecast daily sales.
Solution
Since implementing OneClick.ai, the dairy producer has been able to dramatically decrease inefficiencies in their business, accurately forecast daily sales, and increase the bottom line by tens of millions of dollars every year. By leveraging the automation of OneClick.ai, a team of two with no data science background was able to generate and deploy a model with a double-digit increase in accuracy over the legacy model, providing more granularity and predictability at the product level. Additionally the platform automatically includes all features (promotional, seasonal, weather-related, competition between products), leading to a reliable outlook on daily sales for the business unit.
Key Benefits
- Double-digit increase in model accuracy
- Increased income from significant cost reductions
- Increased efficiency from days of labor to hours of automation
About OneClick.ai
OneClick.ai is the first Automated Deep Learning platform that requires no data science background from users. The platform automatically builds, trains, and deploys custom AI models for applications like sales forecasting, fraud detection, customer retention, image classification, object recognition, recommendation systems and more. OneClick.ai is an official member of the Intel AI Builders program, Tableau Technology Partner program, NVIDIA Inception Program, MapR Platform Partner program and the IBM Marketplace. Funded by Sinovation Ventures, OneClick.ai is headquartered in the Seattle area with operations in the US and China.