Promotion forecasting portal for a Midwest grocery chain
Regional grocery chain, Midwest
- Challenge
- Category managers planned weekly promotions from last year's spreadsheets and gut feel. Over-ordering on promoted lines produced markdowns and waste; under-ordering meant empty shelves by Saturday afternoon. Sales, weather and supplier data sat in three separate systems that nobody had joined up.
- Solution
- We consolidated sales, supplier and weather feeds into a single warehouse and built a web portal where managers see a forecast for each promoted line and store. Planners can override any figure, overrides feed back into the model, and the portal explains which factors drove each forecast.
- Results
- Promotion waste reduced by 17% across 62 stores
- Forecast accuracy up 12 points on the previous method
- Portal delivered in 12 weeks on the existing Azure tenant