SCLAA welcomes an AI-powered demand planning software company for large-scale retailers as a National Partner as it asks all its members to support its valued National Partners where they can.
Quantiful – its newest National Partner – uses purpose-built AI to forecast consumer demand over a range of horizons, from short-term fulfilment planning through demand and supply balancing to long-term portfolio planning.
By removing the dependency on spreadsheets and working with a single source of truth, retailers can significantly improve the accuracy of their forecasts, which allows replenishment to be automated and for organisations to unlock significant productivity gains inside planning and operational departments.
To deliver better forecasts, Quantiful merges historical sales and inventory data with external data on consumers’ buying intent generated from over 90 different data sources, including all of the major social and search platforms. With more accurate forecasts retailers can minimise lost sales and reduce their dependency on working capital by as much as 30 per cent.
Getting the necessary data into and out of Quantiful is easy, helping retailers to reduce the time-to-value to the absolute minimum. Quantiful works closely with all major ERP providers to ensure data flows smoothly in both directions. With the right inputs Quantiful can deliver useful forecasts in a few weeks.
The company is based in ANZ and is committed to servicing the local market with experienced people on the ground to help retailers get the most out of their technology.
Quantiful is different to other demand planning systems available today because:
- It allows retailers to pinpoint the precise drivers of demand
To generate forecasts, Quantiful ingests thousands of sales-related data points per product including attributes such as colour, size, cost, discount, etc. Proprietary sales data can also be combined with external data to identify demand signals that can be trended and understood throughout a product’s lifecycle.
- It can leverage the power of external data sources
Quantiful supports the ability to bring external data sets such as economic, market, social and search into its planning algorithms to improve the quality of its forecasts at every stage in the planning horizon. By combining internal and external data the quality of the insights are significantly enhanced.
- Multi-time-series forecasting
Quantiful is built on a multi-time series forecasting foundation, unlike many other demand planning solutions. This is ground-breaking as Quantiful takes a ‘whole of portfolio’ approach. This means it can forecast the interdependencies of an entire product set, such as cannibalisation and substitution.
- Forecasting at scale
It’s all well and good being able to create highly accurate forecasts for a small set of products at a single store. However, problems arise when you try to forecast hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of product locations. Quantiful is proven to deliver highly accurate daily replenishment forecasts for millions of SKU locations.
Quantiful’s clients include Farmers (part of the James Pascoe Group of companies), Pascoes and Jaycar Australia.
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