The Argility Technology Group, specialist retail predictive and prescriptive analytics organisation within global enterprise, Smollan, is moving up the value chain to offer its best-in-class demand forecasting service to consumer packaged goods (CPGs) manufacturers in South Africa.

Linda Mandyu, Client Success Manager at Argility, says Argility’s Predict Retail portfolio, which includes Predict Price, Predict Inventory and Predict Customer, will be expanded to meet demand from CPG manufacturers. The portfolio offers retailers analytics as a service, using the most advanced models and comprehensive retail data available in the local market. With the expansion of the portfolio, manufacturers will be better supported in forecasting demand and optimising planning, he says.

He explains that the Predict Retail portfolio harnesses AI, ML and best practice, with Google’s groundbreaking new Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) demand forecasting framework.

“TFT has outperformed all other advanced statistical models, reducing inaccuracies by up to 9%. As Google partners, we have access to this TFT framework and have tailored it for demand forecasting, specifically for retailers. Notably, Google’s specialist research results with TFT alone stand head and shoulders above others, but at Argility, we build on this framework and couple it with deep analytics expertise and decades of retail experience to offer best-in-class demand forecasting for the retail industry,” he says.

“Via our parent company Smollan, we also have access to DataOrbis’ expertise in analytics and reporting solutions for consumer brands, and the augmented analytics capabilities this adds to our offering. With these technologies, models and expertise, we have the unique ability to deliver highly accurate predictive analytics (what will happen?) and prescriptive analytics (how can we make it happen again?) for the retail sector value chain; this invariably deepens the partnership of brands and their channel partners.”

Mandyu says category managers and analysts in retail and CPG manufacturing companies can augment their existing toolkits as they harness these advanced tools and Argility’s expertise to significantly improve stockholding and distribution, and reduce costs, without having to allocate huge amounts of human capital internally.

“Argility’s offering is essentially demand forecasting as a service, to supercharge retail category managers’ forecasting capabilities,” Mandyu says.

He notes: “When a retailer or manufacturer has sales and demand forecasting at its most advanced level, they gain the price optimisation advantage. If you overlay this with deep retail sector experience and external data, you can start to pick up very nuanced insights into the impacts of pricing and demand. You can discover things like how much you can raise the price without losing volume, or the influence of factors like promotional prices, complements and substitutes. Argility has worked with retailers for decades, so we are bringing our institutional brains trust to bear, coupled with our class-leading knowledge of deep learning algorithms and price modelling capabilities to partner with brands to enrich their data-driven analysis,” concludes Mandyu.