Amazon Forecast customers

Anaplan Inc. is a cloud-native enterprise SaaS company helping global enterprises orchestrate business performance. Leaders across industries rely on our platform to connect teams systems and insights from across their organizations to continuously adapt to change transform how they operate and reinvent value creation. Based in San Francisco Anaplan has over 20 offices globally 175 partners and approximately 1500 customers worldwide. 

"Our high-impact partnership with Amazon Forecast lets customers weave predictive intelligence across use cases like demand management, financial forecasting, and workforce planning. The enhanced forecast accuracy our PlanIQ solution delivers, which embeds Amazon Forecast, leads to greater intelligence-driven decisions, and its seamless integration within the Anaplan platform makes it easy to leverage different levels of information and data. Customers such as South Central Ambulance Services were up and running in only 2.5 weeks, using PlanIQ to deliver more-accurate weekly and six-week rolling forecasts. By helping them mitigate risk— particularly around spikes in patient demand—PlanIQ helps ensure they’ve got the right resources to deliver the best patient responses and outcomes."

Rohit Shrivastava, Chief Product Officer - Anaplan

The Very Group is the UK’s largest Integrated digital retailer and financial provider — with annual sales of over £2.2 billion and more than 1.8 million website visits every day. With its own brands that include Very.co.uk, Littlewoods.com and LittlewoodsIreland.ie, the company sells more than 1,800 famous brands, has 4.4 million customers and delivers 49 million products every year.

"We collaborated with AWS to leverage AWS forecasting and AI/ML solutions to accelerate and build new retail demand forecasting capabilities. By utilising an international team, and comprehensive collaboration, The Very Group have been incredibly successful in delivering a 9.9% improvement in SKU management worth more than £110 million. These results are due to more than 800 hours invested in the programme, completing over 70 experiments that have generated over 8 million forecasts. We are now expanding the model to other business areas and iterating with additional use cases across the organization and adding newer data to Amazon Forecast to continuously improve the model accuracy."

Steve Pimblett, Chief Data Office - The Very Group

More Retail is the pioneer in omni-channel Food & Grocery Retail in India and is pursuing its mission to be Indian consumers’ most preferred choice for food and grocery needs. More has 22 hyper markets and 624 super markets across India, supported by a network of 13 distribution centres, 7 fruits and vegetables collection centres and 6 staples processing centres.

“More is the market leader in the ‘Fresh’ category in food and grocery in India. To run a viable business, More needs to simultaneously manage in-stock availability of fresh produce, while minimizing wastage. To balance these competing priorities, More partnered with AWS and Ganit, a data science consulting company, to build and deploy a demand forecasting and automated ordering system built around Amazon Forecast. We needed to build a very granular forecast at store-item-day level, therefore we prioritized the development effort based on ABC-XYZ framework.

The store-item combinations were plotted on a 3x3 matrix: ABC axis of sales saliency (A – high, B-Medium, C-low) and XYZ axis of forecastability (X-easier to forecast, Z-difficult to forecast) based on historical pattern. As expected, forecast accuracy of items in ABC-XY buckets was much superior to the Z bucket. However, for combinations in the Z bucket, Amazon DeepAR+ significantly outperformed traditional methods like exponential smoothing yielding an incremental 10% forecast accuracy. This was possible because of Amazon Forecast’s ability to learn other SKUs (XY) patterns and apply to highly volatile items in the Z bucket.

Using Amazon Forecast, we have been able to increase our forecasting accuracy from 27% to 76% reducing wastage by 20% for the fresh produce category. Amazon Forecast provides a distribution of forecasts which helped us optimize our under and over forecasting costs leading to stock-outs at 3% and improved gross margins. This makes it easier for our store managers to place more accurate purchases orders by looking at the daily forecasts. We are now expanding the model to other categories, iterating with additional related datasets, and adding newer data to Amazon Forecast to continuously improve the model accuracy.”

Supratim Banerjee, CTO - More Retail

Meesho is India's largest marketplace for longtail/unbranded products and our vision is to enable 100 million small businesses in India to succeed online. The Meesho marketplace provides micro, small and medium businesses, and individual entrepreneurs access to millions of customers, selection from over 100+ categories, pan-India logistics, payment services, and customer support capabilities to efficiently run their businesses on the Meesho ecosystem.

“At Meesho, we have a lot of products with short life spans and it is important for us to react to key metrics associated with product performance and manage our inventory optimally. By using Amazon Forecast, we were able to predict the demand forecasting of products at weekly/daily with an increase in forecasting accuracy of 20% in comparison to our existing solution. Amazon Forecast provides easy to use APIs that helped us to easily build an automated system in half the time it would have taken for an in-house model. We have achieved promising results so far with Amazon Forecast on our current inventory and we plan to continue leveraging it to improve forecasting accuracy on our ever increasing assortment of products.”

Ravindra Yadav, Director, Data Science - Meesho

Originating as a small music school in Japan in 1962, Shimamura Music was founded in 1969 when it started selling musical instruments to students. With a mission to "create even one more person who can enjoy music," it currently has retail stores and music schools in 39 prefectures nationwide. Known as Japan's largest musical instrument retail store and one of Japan's leading music schools, the company provides support to musicians including repairing instruments, planning and holding events and concerts, and operating music studios.

""Although we weren't completely familiar with AWS, we were still able to use Amazon Forecast to implement automated ordering. The team successfully migrated from our on-premises demand forecasting tool and databases. This allows them to continue working on our long-standing project to improve business. I've been impressed with how the system has evolved while using AWS"

Rumi Aoyagi, Logistics Division - Shimamura Music Co.

Hon Hai Technology Group (Foxconn) is the world’s largest electronics manufacturer and technology solutions provider. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Foxconn faced unprecedented volatility in customer demand, supplies, and capacity. The company collaborated with the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab to develop a demand forecasting model for its factory in Mexico to generate accurate net order forecasts with a simple API call and input data.

“I was very impressed with the world class machine learning team at AWS. My team worked closely with the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab to develop a demand forecast model using Amazon Forecast within a few weeks. Our solution increased our forecasting accuracy by 8%. We project $553K annual savings using this solution for our factory in Mexico. As a bonus, it will be easy to integrate this solution into our cloud workflow once we migrate our data infrastructure to AWS. This collaboration with AWS helped minimize wasted labor costs and maximize customer satisfaction.”

Azim Siddique, Technical Advisor and CoE Architect - Foxconn

Clearly is one of the largest online eyewear retailers in the world, driven by the belief that everyone deserves to see. They bring customers across the globe glasses, contacts, and sunglasses by way of their easy-to-use online platform, and help people in need access free eyewear and eye care services through their Mission to eliminate poor vision.

“With leading e-commerce tools like Virtual Try On, combined with their unparalleled customer service, they strive to help everyone see clearly in an affordable and effortless manner - which means constantly looking for ways to innovate, improve, and streamline processes. Effective and accurate prediction of the customer future behavior is one of the biggest challenges in machine learning in retail today. In just a few weeks, Amazon Forecast enabled us to accurately and reliably forecast sales for the upcoming week with over 97% accuracy, and over 90% accuracy when predicting sales for the following month.”

Dr. Ziv Pollak, Machine Learning Team Leader - Clearly

Swiggy is India's largest on demand hyperlocal marketplace with a vision to provide unparalleled convenience across multiple categories (food, groceries) for urban consumers. Headquartered in Bangalore, Swiggy has presence in 500+ cities partnering with over 130K restaurants/stores and operates an on-demand fleet of 200K delivery partners.

“It is critical for us to quickly react to changes in key business metrics which are segmented spatially (e.g. zone within a city) and temporally (e.g time-of-day). For example, if we can predict changes in key business metrics such as cost per delivery, then we can better manage our associated costs and incentives. AWS Forecast allows us to easily use related data that impacts our business metrics to improve forecasting accuracy. Our initial evaluation of Amazon Forecast to predict our business metrics in the hyperlocal logistics domain looks promising and we plan to leverage it to improve our business metric forecasting accuracy."

Vijay Seshadri, Distinguished Engineer - Swiggy

RetentionX is the plug-and-play analytics solution for any ecommerce store looking to make the best business decisions based on AI-driven data analytics. RetentionX translates your data into clear actions, replacing the power of an entire data science team with just one, easy-to-use tool.

"Our direct-to-consumer customers are looking for quick insights to manage their business operations and drive automated actions. We integrate with any ecommerce system, such as Shopify, and offer more than 100 data science-driven analytics such as demand forecasts, customer lifetime value, churn prediction, cohort analysis, and revenue forecasts. With one click, customers using RetentionX can generate custom machine learning based forecasts on the fly, powered by Amazon Forecast. In addition, customers can easily see insights such as churn prediction and customer lifetime value, which we have built using Amazon SageMaker, and automate marketing activities based on those insights. Our system has been enabled to learn from the data of similar companies, providing unique insights to decision makers. We chose Amazon Forecast for the ease of integration and having the whole architecture at AWS. Amazon Forecast allowed us to scale from 5 to more than 200 individual forecast models in less than a week. As a software-as-a-service solution with hundreds of predictive models, scalability and availability is a must. AWS is the perfect partner for us to ensure this.”

Alexander Jost, CEO - RetentionX

AffordableTours.com is one of the largest travel sellers of escorted tours, cruises, river cruises, and active vacations in the United States and we send travelers all around the world on their dream vacation by offering low prices and providing the highest quality customer service with our award winning service team.

“At AffordableTours.com our customers have a compelling incentive to pick up the phone and call us. We diligently work to offer them low prices on travel packages helping them see and experience new wonders. For our business to thrive and to offer even lower prices we need to find efficiencies everywhere possible. With our global presence we regularly ran into issues having unbalanced resourcing to handle customer call volumes. Some days we had too many agents and other days we had too few which would create inconsistent customer experiences, increased our missed call rates and operating costs. By using Amazon Forecast we are now able to anticipate customer demand call volumes to ensure we have the right number of agents each day improving our missed call rate by approximately 20%."

Marc Rosenthal, Senior Project Manager, Affordabletours.com

Axiom Telecom is the market leader in telecommunications in Mobile Handset and Technology distribution in the Middle East region with a market share of around 55% and an aspiration to grow above 60%. Today, it distributes telecom products to over 10,000 independent and organized retail customers. The company's operations merge wholesale, retail, value added services, and after-sales of wireless mobile devices such as Nokia, Honor, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and Samsung. The group has 30 warehouses and a fleet of more than 300 distribution vehicles.

“Amazon Forecast has allowed us to accurately predict sales and deliver better inventory planning. It is a real win not only for us and our business but also for our customers. Prior to using Amazon Forecast, we heavily relied on a combination of statistical models and manual processes to forecast sales and inventory management. This required a significant resource allocation of time and people to maintain these manual forecasts but also left room for error. With Amazon Forecast we have seen over a 20% increase in demonstrated availability and 15% in stock optimization. Furthermore, we have shifted our teams that were doing manual forecasts to now focus on more value added efforts of extracting insights from the new forecasts to help improve our business outcomes.”

Wassim Al Khayat - Group Director of Technology and Innovation

Heroleads is Southeast Asia's leading performance marketing company who provides clients with an integrated end-to-end solution that is tailored to their marketing needs and maximizes MROI.

“Our media planner team spends over 60% of their time on building and maintaining manual forecast models, supporting the Sales & Operation Team to understand the performance trends of various digital marketing channels and industries and to plan how we achieve KPIs. By integrating Amazon Forecast, we will free up the team to focus on more value-added work, expand the reach of our models to be used by other teams and improve our forecast model accuracy to 99%. Using Forecast increases our ability to better serve our customers and increases the confidence within our team through faster insights, improved predictability, performance alerting systems, dynamic budget planning and more accurate investment models to ensure all our marketing campaign KPIs are met efficiently and at the right time."

Amit Das, Lead Data Engineer - Heroleads

OMOTOR helps businesses improve through AI by providing them with the best of machine learning algorithms, computer vision techniques and cognitive bots that can communicate via WhatsApp and others platforms.

"At OMOTOR, we use AI to innovate on behalf of our customers, so access to the most cutting-edge deep learning technologies from AWS is imperative to our client's success. Using Amazon Forecast gives us the ability to create and refine various forecasts from time series data without having to build and train a model manually every time. We forecast real sales for the next 12 months, so we can adequately plan for inventory, estimate future profitability, track market share gain or loss, and other insights. This means we can use more contextual data, optimize more frequently, generate forecasts with upwards of 50% improvements in accuracy, and operate at a great speed. For example, we're helping customers in the automotive industry predict sales across 185 vehicles in Brazil.”

Marcio Rodrigues, CEO - OMOTOR

ketteQ is a unique digital platform for supply chain planning and automation solutions built in and deployed on Salesforce and AWS clouds, scale and security. Built by supply chain experts with decades of experience, ketteQ offers advanced data management and analytics combined with collaborative and automated workflows designed for security, scalability and configurability. Based in Atlanta, Georgia ketteQ has a team, partners and customers that span the globe.

"ketteQ's demand planning and forecasting solution is used to generate forecasts for a variety of use cases, including forecasting for retail and omnichannel businesses, service parts forecasting, seasonal product forecasting, promotions planning and beyond. ketteQ’s partnership with AWS allows us to offer to our clients a comprehensive forecasting solution that combines the innovative science of Amazon Forecast with the collaborative and consensus forecasting capability of ketteQ. The combination of insights derived from historical data with forward-looking intelligence from sales, marketing and finance produces a highly accurate forecast."

At Forenamics, their mission is to combat supply chain inefficiencies within Fast-Moving Consumer Goods manufacturing companies. Through their high-end demand planning solutions, customers are able to plan their own production more accurately to avoid both overproduction and underproduction. Forenamics is based in Cologne, Germany, and serves customers ranging from global industry leaders to the Mittelstand.

"At Forenamics, we are committed to providing our customers with the highest demand planning accuracy possible. We help our customers to better understand the key demand drivers such as promotions, marketing, pricing and much more. Our unique, high accuracy forecasting model reduces overproduction by up to 35% as well as underproduction by 25% resulting in significantly higher deliverability and waste reduction. Amazon Forecast has been an excellent partner in business and match to our platform, in order to achieve accuracy, concurrency and agility.”

Jonathan Kurth, Founder & CEO - Forenamics

Remarkably is a marketing intelligence solution for U.S. multifamily real estate teams. The platform enables customers to stay on top of marketing and leasing performance issues, risks and opportunities so they can drive higher revenue, more efficiently, at lower cost, with better ROI.

“Leading U.S. multifamily marketing teams use Remarkably to monitor and analyze their property marketing and leasing funnels, and their advertising channel performance and ROI. Our customers value historical data that indicates what’s happened, and KPI forecasts indicating what’s likely to happen, so they can take action to avoid risks and capitalize on opportunities. These two important data sets help our users optimize valuable marketing resources and avoid drops in occupancy and revenue. We leveraged Amazon Forecast for our product’s KPI forecasts, with great results. The integration was relatively simple, fast and cost-effective, which allowed us to deliver a high-value, stable forecasts to customers on schedule and within budget."

Anna-Lea Dieringer, Co-Founder - Remarkably

Datup is a Demand Planning and Inventory Management SaaS platform for manufacturing and retail companies to transform data in time and capital savings. Datup solution allows its customers to integrate multiple sources, such as ERPs, spreadsheets and plain files in the cloud. Datup's AI-oriented technology in forecasting and inventory optimization allows our customers to increase their revenues improving service levels and release working capital avoiding overstocks.

“In Datup, we are committed to partner with our customers in the adoption path of emerging technologies for their supply chains, which could translate into operational efficiency and sustainability. Forecasting is a cornerstone of our value proposition, not only improving demand planning accuracy based on data-oriented instruments, but also reducing the operative burden related to the information readiness in accordance with the response time required by the business. Amazon Forecast has been an excellent match to our platform, in order to achieve accuracy, concurrency and agility. Our customers (self-service or high-touch) expect the processing of hundreds to thousands of sku-locations, within few hours, to make on-time and best-informed decisions upon their operation plans. The dynamic and accurate input into our inventory optimization feature, obtained from the forecasts, has helped our customers to improve their service levels and fill rates over 92%, while releasing up to 20% of capital derived from overstocks and obsoletes."

Ramiro Chaparro, CTO - Datup