Transform supply chain planning into your competitive advantage with Anaplan and Amazon Forecast

Facing an increasingly competitive and rapidly shifting marketplace, businesses are under pressure to find new opportunities faster than ever. The volatility has hit consumer goods companies and retailers especially hard, challenging them to optimize their supply chain, reduce waste, and drive faster, smarter decision-making.

For many, the answer lies in harnessing the vast quantities of data available both inside and outside the organization. By extracting intelligent insights from these data stores, and factoring in external variables, such as weather and supply chain disruptions, you can predict demand more accurately, respond faster to market changes, and improve operational efficiency.

This is no simple task. To uncover and understand these insights and trends, you need to collect, prepare, and analyze data in a timely manner, often in near real-time. This can easily overwhelm a business that faces a torrent of data from a complex array of sources.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) solutions offer powerful tools to meet this challenge, but to be effective they need to be quick and simple to deploy across your day-to-day operations.

Next-gen forecasting / forecasting made easy

Amazon Web Services (AWS) helps you improve forecasting with solutions such as Amazon Forecast and AWS Partners like Anaplan and its PlanIQ solution. By combining the newest ML technologies with internal, external and third-party data, these tools help you:

• Unlock insights
• Optimize critical tasks like assortment planning and inventory management
• Reduce waste

You also gain better visibility into replenishment levels to react quickly to changes in demand. As ML technologies continue to advance, it will be amazing to see the new innovations rolling out in this space in 2023 and beyond.

Drive accurate decisions with seamlessly integrated ML-based forecasting

Anaplan PlanIQ leverages AWS intelligent forecasts as well as Anaplan-native algorithms, including Multivariate Linear Regression (MVLR), to help companies make more informed predictions using fewer resources. In a nutshell, MVLR helps you predict, for example, the sales of a product using independent variables like price, distribution, and regional competitive prices. With PlanIQ, everyday businesses can employ ML with advanced intelligence and data analytics to deliver easy-to-understand results, creating more precise forecasts for virtually any business condition.

Since PlanIQ doesn’t require any special skills to configure, deploy and operate, it’s easier to get started quickly on unlocking new insights. You can leverage different types of data sets and sources such as historical trends, third-party data, market signals, and weather patterns. Architecting multiple data sets creates robust forecasts and plans quickly, allowing you to uncover business opportunities, and drive next-best decisions faster.

PlanIQ provides a seamless integration with Amazon Forecast making it easier to create and deploy forecasts with Anaplan. PlanIQ offers several methods for validating forecast models, such as creating a backtest that simulates how your forecast model would have performed in the past.

Integration with Amazon Forecast delivers timely results

Companies in retail, consumer packaged goods (CPG) and manufacturing are among the many organizations experiencing better business outcomes with PlanIQ. “We’ve seen an improvement in our ability to forecast capacity that should help lead to improved service levels and reduction of expediting expenses,” says Wade Latham, senior director of operations for Carter’s, a major U.S. children’s apparel brand. With the help of Anaplan, Carter’s removed eight days of inventory from its supply chain and saved $25 million annually in inventory carrying costs.

The ability of PlanIQ to automate and repeat successful forecasting processes across a range of business functions is attracting a broader community of users. Many are benefiting from increased time savings, operational efficiencies, and new levels of forecast accuracy. In 70% of predictions, ML or statistical forecasts deliver the same or greater efficiency than an expert.

“Business leaders recognize that accurate, intelligent forecasting is critical to effectively meeting customer needs and achieving operational efficiencies. However, they may not know how to create accurate forecasts with all of the data available to them,” said Ankur Mehrotra, General Manager, AI, at AWS. “PlanIQ and Amazon Forecast allow customers to apply advanced ML techniques to their data in order to generate accurate forecasts for their businesses. We’re thrilled to see the value these services are creating for organizations.”

Leveraging PlanIQ across a variety of use cases

You can deploy PlanIQ across a range of use cases, including retail and inventory forecasting, workforce planning, and travel demand forecasting. Recently, one retailer of food and hygiene products used the solution to run forecasts for 10,000 SKUs using both historical data and product attributes to populate the solution’s ML algorithms. The company improved forecast accuracy by 1.4%, saving an estimated $4 million in one region.

For CPG and retail teams struggling to accurately predict product demand, PlanIQ can help drive a more agile forecasting process, saving valuable time and helping teams more quickly analyze, align, and optimize inventory. Retailers and consumer brands can use PlanIQ to:

• Refine commercial revenue plans
• Quickly pinpointing at-risk factors to build more effective marketing strategies
• Boost margins

In addition, PlanIQ simplifies financial planning processes with easy data configuration and fast operating expense forecasts, helping to speed up business decisions.

Anaplan PlanIQ with Amazon Forecast is now available on the Anaplan platform. Learn more about Anaplan’s intelligence offerings, read the PlanIQ solution brief, and watch the demo video Intelligent Forecasting with Anaplan PlanIQ.

Anaplan in AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace can help you easily procure, deploy, and manage cloud technology and data management solutions purpose-built for the industry.

You can find Anaplan on AWS in the AWS Marketplace for customers in the United States region.

Find all AWS Retail offerings in AWS Marketplace »

Anaplan Connect global event series

Anaplan Connect is a new global event series hosted by Anaplan. If you are looking to connect with a dynamic community of business executive leaders and experts to discover new ways to see, plan, and lead organizations with clarity and confidence this event is for you. By attending, you will be able to:

• Discover how you can eliminate planning confusion and deliver dramatic results with the Anaplan platform.
• Connect with peers in your industry who are radically changing their business outcomes with Connect Planning.
• Leave with the right tools and strategies that can make you a catalyst for change in your organization.

To find a city near you, visit Anaplan Connect event page »

Suggested additional reading Driving Stronger Retail Profits with Intelligent On-demand Forecasting from PlanIQ and Amazon Forecast »

AWS Partner spotlight

Anaplan is a transformative way to see, plan, and run your business. Using their proprietary Hyperblock™ technology, Anaplan lets you contextualize real-time performance, and forecast future outcomes for faster, confident decisions. Because connecting strategy and plans to collaborative execution across your enterprise is required to move business forward today. Based in San Francisco, Anaplan has 20 offices globally, 175 partners and more than 1,700 customers worldwide. To learn more, visit Anaplan.com.