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Tech Giant Scales Data Science Output by 300% with AI-Driven Planning

 

The Client

One of the world’s leading technology companies manages an extensive product portfolio, selling over 50,000 unique products across multiple countries and industries. As a global manufacturer, they rely heavily on precise supply chain and demand planning operations to maintain their market leadership position. Their manufacturing process is highly complex, involving worldwide production facilities and intricate supply chain networks. Accurate demand forecasting is crucial for their success – it helps them optimize inventory levels, reduce costs, and efficiently meet their diverse customer needs. 

The Challenge

The data science team faced severe operational bottlenecks that limited forecasting effectiveness:

  • Managing over 50,000 SKUs across diverse regions and industries made detailed modeling impossible for different time horizons
  • The vast scope forced them to rely on broad, generalized forecasts instead of precise, tailored predictions
  • Limited bandwidth prevented exploration of external factors, reducing forecast reliability, particularly for long-term planning
  • Time-consuming manual processes trapped analysts in model maintenance rather than innovation and value creation

These constraints resulted in significant financial impact: revenue losses from stockouts when demand exceeded forecasts, and excess inventory costs when predictions ran too high.

The Solution

decisionOS delivers a comprehensive data science workflow automation solution that has revolutionized their modelling pipeline. It enables sophisticated demand planning at an unprecedented scale while maintaining granular accuracy. Through three key components, we are transforming how their data science team operates:

  • Automated Modeling Pipeline: Our end-to-end automation enables rapid feature transformation and selection at scale. The platform builds models across different product groups and time horizons while preserving each category’s unique characteristics. The system seamlessly aggregates and transforms data about customer demand, deals, and product performance from multiple sources.
  • External Driver Integration: The automated pipeline quickly evaluates external factors like macroeconomic data, building more robust models. It rapidly tests different feature combinations while maintaining each product category’s unique patterns, making the models more resilient to external changes.
  • Interactive Model Inspector: Our visual interface revolutionizes how stakeholders interact with models. Business stakeholders can select specific models, view actual versus predicted values over time, and examine feature contributions through an intuitive clicking interface. This tool maintains and monitors over 20 deployed models, automatically flagging when retraining is needed.

The Impact

Our platform revolutionized the tech company’s  demand planning through comprehensive data science automation, delivering unprecedented scale and precision:

  • 3x Productivity Breakthrough: A small data science team now manages precise forecasting across 50,000 SKUs – a scope previously impossible. This 300% productivity gain fundamentally changed their forecasting capabilities.
  • Executive-Level Intelligence: Senior leaders, including the CFO, leverage a custom interactive dashboard to visualize predictions against actuals and understand key drivers in real time. This bridges the critical gap between complex modeling and strategic decision-making.
  • Enhanced Resilience: Automated integration of macroeconomic indicators strengthens forecast accuracy and enables early detection of supply chain disruptions, transforming reactive planning into a proactive strategy.
  • Innovation Unleashed: Freed from manual model maintenance, the data science team now drives strategic initiatives and uncovers new business opportunities – shifting from operational overhead to value creation. 

This Data Science automation powered by decisionOS has fundamentally transformed their demand planning capabilities – from time-consuming manual processes to an automated, scalable system that provides granular insights across their complex supply chain.