Our client is a global consumer packaged goods company working in the food product space. The forecasting process they currently have in place is extremely effort-intensive and driven by heuristics. The client wanted to have a robust and transparent demand planning process that is consistent across all markets and categories.

The objective was to

• Develop forecasting models to predict shipments with reasonable accuracy for three years
• Provide a breakdown of the predicted shipments into baseline and incremental components
• Develop a scalable solution framework to forecast shipments for multiple products across all markets

• Huge volume of data with millions of records and thousands of features
• No clear view of base demand and lift due to various factors
• Custom treatment of different types of products (like discontinued, seasonal, new or converted items)
• Handling the product x retailer combinations with sparse data (no frequent shipments)