Mixture degree forecasts
The first forecast of this sub-team is the aggregate-level gross sales forecast. With this venture, we forecast the gross sales for the upcoming X weeks, each on the weekly and every day ranges. To offer a little bit of context round aggregation, one attainable degree of aggregation might be the gross sales of the corporate as a complete. Such a forecast may help with making company-level choices and dealing on setting objectives and expectations. One other attainable degree could be gross sales that come via the warehouses of bol, which is essential for operations and workforce allocation.
An necessary frequent attribute of most aggregate-level forecasts in our staff is that additionally they rely upon the gross sales forecast (making them downstream forecasts), as gross sales are sometimes the first driver of many different metrics that we’re forecasting.
This leads us to a different essential forecast, which is the buyer assist interplay forecast. With this venture, we offer an estimate of what number of interactions our buyer assist brokers can count on inside the subsequent weeks. This forecast is essential for the enterprise, as we don’t wish to over-forecast, which might result in overstaffing of buyer assist. Alternatively, we additionally don’t wish to under-forecast, as that will result in prolonged ready instances for our prospects.
To guarantee that our providers (webshop, app) scale properly in the course of the peak interval (November and December), we additionally present a request forecast, that’s, what number of requests the providers can count on in the course of the busy intervals.
Lastly, we offer a variety of logistics-related forecasts. Bol has a number of warehouses wherein we retailer each our personal objects, and the objects of our companions who wish to use bol’s logistical capabilities to make their enterprise function easily. As such, we offer just a few completely different forecasts associated to logistics.
The primary one is logistics outbound forecasts, that’s, a forecast indicating what number of objects will go away our warehouses within the coming weeks. Equally, we offer an inbound forecast, which focuses on objects arriving in our warehouses. Moreover, we additionally present a extra specialised inbound forecast that additional divides the incoming objects by the kind of package deal they arrive in (for instance, a pallet vs a field). That’s necessary as these completely different sorts of packages are processed by completely different stations inside the warehouses and we’d like to verify they’re staffed appropriately.
Merchandise degree forecasts
The second sub-team focuses on item-level forecasts. Bol gives round 36 million distinctive objects on the platform, and for many of these, we do want to supply demand forecasts. These predictions are used for stocking functions. This manner, we attempt to anticipate the wants of our prospects and order any objects they could require properly prematurely in order that we will ship it to them as quickly as attainable.
Moreover, the staff gives a devoted forecast that may deal with newly launched objects and pre-orders. With this forecast, the stakeholders can anticipate what number of objects will promote in the future earlier than the discharge and inside the subsequent month after the discharge. This manner, we will guarantee that we have now sufficient copies of FIFA or Stephen King’s newest novel.
Lastly, our staff additionally developed a promotional uplift forecast, which helps to judge the uplift in gross sales of a given merchandise primarily based on the value low cost and the length of the promotion. This forecast is utilized by our specialists to make higher, data-driven choices on the subject of designing promotions.