Machine Learning-Enabled Forecasting: The Fuel To The Future

Every organization, every department within an organization does demand forecasting. Be it the finance department to create financial budgets, be it the sales team building a sales plan, be it the operations team building a demand plan, or be it the marketing team building marketing plan. The traditional forecasting process for any department remains a manual, lengthy and tedious process - trying to manually wrangle through weeds of data and extract insights to build a forecast. This process is also not very iterative and agile, which it needs to be for how the customer needs and requirements are evolving at a very rapid rate. 

Machine Learning powered algorithms can not only process terabytes of data across multiple disparate data sources and intelligently build a base line forecast, but also can help organizations build scenario-based forecasts that can be “what-if ’ed” through at a very fast pace. This enables experts and key stake holders to utilize their time in analyzing and tweaking the base forecast to fit to their business and customer needs.

Manual vs ML Based Forecasting

The main areas where ML based forecasting can help organizations are:

• Accuracy and Transparency in their forecasts – Ericsson’s recent case study shows that ML forecasts have reduced errors by 40%-50%.
• Adaptability to changes – ML algorithms can adapt to data changes and align their predictions quickly.
• Efficient use of resources – ML algorithms can help in reducing significant amount of manual work required in traditional forecasting process – essentially saving time and money.
• Accessibility – ML algorithms are becoming more accessible with advancement in technology, and not require traditional and specialized knowledge.

It has become imperative that technology has become a part of our present and will play a major role in building our future. The ability to integrate technology to learn, adapt and execute at work will be the key to success.

Please contact us to learn more about how we help organizations to implement a cloud based planning system with ML features – Workday Adaptive Planning, and put them on the road to success.