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Beyond Lagging Indicators: How a Food & Beverage Giant Revolutionized Demand Planning

Faced with inaccurate forecasts and low adoption from its sales teams, one of the world's largest food and beverage companies needed a smarter way to plan. Discover how they replaced legacy systems with o9’s Digital Brain to integrate leading market drivers—like weather, promotions, and Nielsen data—into a single ML forecasting platform, significantly improving accuracy and alignment.

Inaccurate forecasts and low adoption by the sales organization were a challenge for this customer. Moreover, they were unable to use drivers of demand to better predict the future.

Sustainability impact

Reduction of food waste and reduction of inventory.

challenges

Complexity to Clarity

Challenge

The forecast accuracy was low, and lagging indicators were predominantly being used in the forecasting process.

Solution

With o9, this company was able to incorporate internal and external drivers of demand into o9’s highly differentiated ML forecasting capabilities.

Value Delivery

Systems Replaced

  • Blue Yonder
  • SAP APO

Key Functionalities Implemented

The o9 Enterprise Knowledge Graph was used to build market knowledge models (competitors, consumers, retailers, distributors) and demand-knowledge models that incorporate leading indicators of sell-out (trade promotions, marketing initiatives, weather, competitor pricing and promotions, Nielsen and IRI data). o9 leveraged its open architecture by using best-in-class algorithms from R and Python to get to an optimal forecast.

Customer Benefits

success factors

  • o9’s highly differentiated knowledge graph allows for the incorporation of leading indicators of demand and turning those indicators into more accurate forecasts and commercial insights.
  • o9’s scalable and cloud native platform with highly differentiated open architecture leveraged best-in-class analytics.
  • The amazing user experience of the platform allowed for high user adoption by the sales organization.

KPI Impacted

  • Significant improvement of forecast accuracy and a much more consistent bias.
  • Significant inventory improvement.
  • Reduction of lost sales.

The Complete Guide to Strategic Demand Planning 2026

Forecasting is the first step. Learn how to transform predictions into precise actions.

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