Demand Sensing: Omnichannel, Real-Time, and Granular
Don’t settle for static forecasts and disconnected data. Anticipate and meet customer demand across all channels.
How Informed Are Your Forecasts?
Status quo techniques make the best of limited data — but merchandise planning teams are sitting on a goldmine of untapped insight. Demand sensing offers an elevator into the data depths.
Augment Superficial Data
Historical performance, current sales, and inventory feeds are all sources you’re likely using — the ceiling of what spreadsheet-based approaches can handle. Demand sensing tools can help you take full advantage of this surface-level data.
Layer In Digital And Features
Add critical channel data that often sits siloed. Mine your product attributes for insights into complementarity or cannibalization. Weather matter for your brand? Demand sensing models can account for that, too.
Multivariate Omnichannel Forecasts
Round out your foresight with physical channel analytics and any hyper-local data that might be relevant, such as events.
How Actionable Are Your Forecasts?
Calculating demand for any given item by hand: doable. Calculating demand for all size and color iterations for each item across all channels: forget about it. Spreadsheets just don’t cut it.
Dizzying Combinatorics
Just one shirt requires 20 separate forecasts across its 4 sizes and 5 colorways. An entire assortment? We’ll let you do the math. Or better yet, a demand sensing model can easily handle forecasting across your entire range.
Data That Informs Next Best Actions
Demand sensing offers planners, buyers, and allocators forecast accuracy at the SKU-store level — the level at which daily decisions are made, and the granularity required to ensure they meet demand without overstocking.
AI Is The Big Data Solution
Configurations and eligibility requirements — store tier, local events, regional style preferences, etc. — further increase computational complexity. Demand sensing models easily handle this big data problem.
How Scalable Are Your Forecasts?
The weekly rhythm of retail requires tight integration between forecast, strategic rules, and inventory execution across teams, big and small. Demand sensing tools act as the grand unifier.
Strategy and Execution Should Live Together
Forecasts are just one piece of an intricate merchandising and planning puzzle. Business rules, target metrics, constraints — your strategy — all live somewhere. But bringing that strategy to life frequently takes place in spreadsheets.
The Excel Coding Conundrum
The standard solution? Hardcoded rules in spreadsheet cells. While convenient, formulas in these cells are executing some of your most critical business strategies. Difficult to update, difficult to troubleshoot.
Making Strategy Actionable
Demand sensing tools bring your strategy to the forefront of your merchandising and planning execution system. Dynamic adjustments to target margin, display requirements, store-SKU eligibility, shipping minimums, and more are just a click away.
Demand Sensing Features That Unlock Human Potential
Data Unification
Demand sensing systems collate and standardize valuable inputs across channels, systems, and teams.
- Ingests all meaningful and available data, both internal and external.
- Flexible data integration options: SFTP, direct integration, data warehouse, API, and more.
- Rapid time-to-value with white-glove data onboarding.
Computational Strength
Multivariate analysis becomes omnivariate modeling with the power of AI.
- Accurate store-level forecasts at the most granular level.
- Advanced, non-linear models capture complex demand-supply relationships.
- Forecasting-as-a-service enables rapid innovation and model iteration.
AI Orchestration
Feed strategy and execution needs into an intelligent brain, freeing human resources to innovate and elevate.
- In-system configurability to set and update business logic constraints.
- Models proactively address data sparsity and irregular patterns.
- System aligns recommendations to key target metrics like WOS or max/min constraints for display and shipment.
Lambros Papadatos
Ivan Tchakarov
Eva Sirera Constanti
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The Art & Science of Demand Sensing
Maximize sales, minimize markdowns, and optimize inventory levels while elevating your merchandising and planning teams.
