The Opportunity
- A consumer goods manufacturer had invested in forecasting software and staff time with the expectation of realizing substantial accuracy improvements. They weren’t seeing any.
Our Approach
They asked First Analytics to conduct an audit of processes, analytics, and data to identify opportunities to unlock the value that was believed to be present, but was currently not accessible. They wanted to know:
- Whether there were mistakes in the implementation.
- Whether there were better or alternate ways to implement it.
- Whether and how a change might improve forecast accuracy.
The Impact
- We found that there were no material deviations from best practices in deploying this kind of system. But we found ample opportunities for improvement.
- Between recommendations on methodology, data, and processes, we were able to reduce forecast error by 19.6% to 92.7%, depending on the geography and forecasting timeframe.