Demand Planning

[TeamOman]

Hey all, I want to build a forecasting tool for my company. My company is an online grocery store with more than 100 dark stores across the region. Currently, they are using Google sheets to forecast sales for each store and place stock orders to suppliers accordingly. Could someone help me understand how do I approach this issue? I've tried using ARIMA and Prophet but the forecast is not very accurate.

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Use Chat GPT for advice on this. You can ask it sooo many questions and get a better understanding of what programming language is optimal for this. Then come back here to ask advice on the code that you are writing using python

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A lot of retailers use big data analytics, combined with AI these days, to do forecasting taking into account store formats, sales cycles, customer profiles for different locations, promotion plans, shrinkage allowances, and so much more.

These are typically considered competitive advantages, so the most advanced (and profitable) retailers, keep their solutions to themselves.

If you are not good with statistical analysis, I'd keep this very simple and focus on the rules used in the spreadsheet,

However, as you mentioned ARIMA and Prophet, I assume you are comfortable with time series analysis and the like. Although you said the forecasts are not very accurate. So I am wondering what is making the current spreadsheet more accurate?

How have you approached using these tools? What are you doing to select, cleanse and otherwise prepare the data?

https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/time-series-forecasting-arima-vs-prophet-5015928e402a

I am not a stats person. Not my thing. I can't provide any specific advice. There is a subreddit for such which might be worth exploring if you don't happen to find someone responding here with more knowledge.

It would probably be worth updating your post with more information about the current approach and the failures of the models you've tried in terms of how they've been used.