Major Food Distributor Boosts Forecasting Accuracy for Superior Results

The client is a $25 billion food service distributor serving approximately 300,000 restaurants and food service operators. Early in 2020, the company embarked on a project to develop an open-source demand forecasting system that would help them drastically improve their forecast accuracy. The company’s objective was to eventually attain 99.5% accuracy in their high-level forecasts.

However, despite an existing tenured and skilled team of analysts and data scientists, they quickly realized such a major initiative required deeper analytics proficiency than the company possessed internally.

The Parker Avery analytics team worked closely with the client to deploy the firm’s open-source analytics platform to suit the food service distributor’s specific requirements across forecasting and supply chain.

Parker Avery’s team provided the following services:

• Advanced analytics
• Solution implementation
• Project management
• Training development and deployment

Parker Avery provided comprehensive training and documentation to ensure the client’s data sciences team could continue to use the system without the need for ongoing outside expertise.

Because of Parker Avery’s comprehensive knowledge transfer, the client was subsequently able to independently apply an extension of the platform to an additional demand analytics capability. Before the project, this type of development would have taken several months, but the company’s analytics team achieved the new capability in a single day.