Mixture stage forecasts
The first forecast of this sub-team is the aggregate-level gross sales forecast. With this undertaking, 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 attainable stage of aggregation may very well be the gross sales of the corporate as an entire. Such a forecast can assist with making company-level selections and dealing on setting targets and expectations. One other attainable stage could be gross sales that come by way of the warehouses of bol, which is essential for operations and workforce allocation.
An essential frequent attribute of most aggregate-level forecasts in our workforce is that additionally they rely on 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 undertaking, 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 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 clients.
To guarantee that our companies (webshop, app) scale nicely through the peak interval (November and December), we additionally present a request forecast, that’s, what number of requests the companies can anticipate through the busy intervals.
Lastly, we offer a variety of logistics-related forecasts. Bol has a number of warehouses through 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 totally different forecasts associated to logistics.
The primary one is logistics outbound forecasts, that’s, a forecast indicating what number of gadgets will go away 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 essential as these totally different sorts of packages are processed by totally different stations inside the warehouses and we want to ensure 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 fashion, we attempt to anticipate the wants of our clients and order any gadgets they could require nicely upfront in order that we are able to ship it to them as quickly as attainable.
Moreover, the workforce supplies 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 in the future earlier than the discharge and inside the subsequent month after the discharge. This fashion, we are able to guarantee that we’ve got sufficient copies of FIFA or Stephen King’s newest novel.
Lastly, our workforce additionally developed a promotional uplift forecast, which helps to judge the uplift in gross sales of a given merchandise based mostly on the worth low cost and the period of the promotion. This forecast is utilized by our specialists to make higher, data-driven selections in relation to designing promotions.