Reliable regional forecasts for sales, profit, cash flow – to guide budgets and cash decisions.
The challenge
Promo-driven spikes, short histories on many SKUs, and spreadsheet workflows made planning volatile. Finance needed bi weekly and monthly region-level forecasts that are stable across categories and roll up cleanly into margin and cashflow.
Feature-rich regional model
Unified POS/ERP histories by region with promo calendars, price ladders, availability, holidays/weather, and media. Engineered lags, moving averages, promo flags, and calendar seasonality at the region granularity.
Ensemble forecasting (champion/challenger)
Primary models: Random Forest ensembles trained per SKU×region (and category×region where sensible) with stacked horizons. Baselines: regularized OLS and LSTM. Automatic per-SKU/region model selection from rolling backtests.
Profit & cashflow bridge
Volume → revenue (price & promo mechanics) → gross margin (COGS, trade terms) → cashflow using region-specific DSO/DPO/DSI assumptions and payment calendars. Delivered central and conservative bands for planning.
Custom outlier detection (rolling window)
Rolling-window anomaly screening flags period-specific outliers (promo mislabels, one-off dumps, inventory corrections). Rules + robust statistics adjust or quarantine points before training/forecasting, with audit trails and human override.
MLOps & governance
Weekly retrains with rolling-origin CV; data-quality checks; dashboards for forecast vs actuals, bias by horizon, drift and anomaly alerts. CI/CD for pipelines; versioned models/configs.-world results.
What we built
How it works (flow)
Ingest & validate → feature build (region) → outlier screen (rolling window) → per SKU×region training (RF + baselines) → rolling backtests & selection → forecast generation → profit & cashflow projection → dashboards/API to planning tools.
Results
More stable regional forecasts during promotions, improved long-tail behavior, and clearer visibility for finance thanks to the volume→margin→cashflow bridge. Outlier governance reduced rework and increased trust across merchandising, supply chain, and FP&A.
2 ML Engineers
Project Manager
DevOps Engineer
Backend Developer
Team:
Ready to map your first (or next) AI assistant?
Get a free 30-minute scoping call to pinpoint feasible use cases and a pragmatic path to production.
