How Planalytics Is Different
As companies continue along their digital transformation journeys, there is a growing focus on better understanding the factors that influence consumer demand and purchasing behavior. Retailers and other consumer-focused businesses are increasingly relying on the power of SaaS solutions and ML/AI technologies to get closer to their customers and stay a step ahead of changing demand patterns.
Planalytics helps companies address this key priority with predictive demand analytics that precisely quantify the consumer’s relationship with the weather – the most volatile, immediate, and significant day-to-day external variable impacting sales.
Businesses have long recognized the importance of the weather as an external demand driver and many have sought ways to factor it into plans and forecasts. Planalytics’ analytics-as-a-service approach makes it easy for companies to successfully do this and do it quickly by enhancing technologies currently being used (ERPs, demand forecasting solutions, ML platforms, etc.). Planalytics integration-ready predictive demand analytics enable companies to maximize current technology investments to improve demand forecasting accuracy and begin capturing financial benefits (increased sales from better availability, reduced inventory-related costs, improved margins, etc.) within weeks.
Some pre-packaged software solutions claim to “handle the weather” and it is not unusual to hear data science teams say they will add weather data to address the issue in a ML/AI forecasting platform. Don’t be surprised if the results fail to meet expectations.
Weather data has unique characteristics that make developing reliable, granular, and scalable demand analytics challenging. Unlike other common time series data sets, weather is geo-diverse. Machine learning solutions have shown their greatest improvements on lower volume items and less success with high volume items where inventories are replenished often. And, it takes time to test and train solutions to deal with weather data and its relationships to demand.
Planalytics pioneered the science of weather-driven demand analytics and our metrics are relied on by some of the world’s largest retail companies. With two decades of experience analyzing demand relationships from trillions of consumer purchases, Planalytics provides the fastest path possible to a better demand forecast.
Planalytics provides a ready-to-use, highly tuned, feature-engineered analytic that can be used to automatically make demand adjustments in leading retail solutions (view integration partners) and ML-based forecasting engines. Planning accuracy improvements of 20% or more are common for specific products, locations, and time periods. In comparing ML solutions that incorporate weather data with Planalytics’ weather-driven demand metrics, tests have shown Planalytics generating double the accuracy improvements on average.
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