Mixture stage forecasts
The first forecast of this sub-team is the aggregate-level gross sales forecast. With this mission, we forecast the gross sales for the upcoming X weeks, each on the weekly and every day ranges. To present a little bit of context round aggregation, one potential stage of aggregation may very well be the gross sales of the corporate as an entire. Such a forecast may also help with making company-level selections and dealing on setting objectives and expectations. One other potential stage can be gross sales that come by means of the warehouses of bol, which is essential for operations and workforce allocation.
An vital widespread attribute of most aggregate-level forecasts in our staff is that in addition 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 mission, we offer an estimate of what number of interactions our buyer assist brokers can anticipate inside the subsequent weeks. This forecast is essential for the enterprise, as we don’t need to over-forecast, which might result in overstaffing of buyer assist. However, we additionally don’t need to under-forecast, as that might result in prolonged ready occasions for our clients.
To guarantee that our providers (webshop, app) scale effectively throughout the peak interval (November and December), we additionally present a request forecast, that’s, what number of requests the providers can anticipate throughout the busy intervals.
Lastly, we offer a spread of logistics-related forecasts. Bol has a number of warehouses by which we retailer each our personal gadgets, and the gadgets of our companions who want to use bol’s logistical capabilities to make their enterprise function easily. As such, we offer a couple of completely different forecasts associated to logistics.
The primary one is logistics outbound forecasts, that’s, a forecast indicating what number of gadgets will depart our warehouses within the coming weeks. Equally, we offer an inbound forecast, which focuses on gadgets arriving in our warehouses. Moreover, we additionally present a extra specialised inbound forecast that additional divides the incoming gadgets by the kind of package deal they arrive in (for instance, a pallet vs a field). That’s vital 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 stage forecasts
The second sub-team focuses on item-level forecasts. Bol provides round 36 million distinctive gadgets 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 clients and order any gadgets they may require effectively prematurely in order that we are able to ship it to them as quickly as potential.
Moreover, the staff offers a devoted forecast that may deal with newly launched gadgets and pre-orders. With this forecast, the stakeholders can anticipate what number of gadgets will promote at some point earlier than the discharge and inside the subsequent month after the discharge. This manner, we are able to 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 worth low cost and the length of the promotion. This forecast is utilized by our specialists to make higher, data-driven selections in the case of designing promotions.
