Forecasting at speed and scale for NielsenIQ

With more data available than ever before, enterprises must leverage past insights into strategic future plans to stay competitive. As society and consumer behavior evolve, businesses need sophisticated forecasting platforms to adapt and meet market demands. Flexible solutions are essential to handle new, varied challenges and provide insights for future actions. Thus, while most businesses track performance, the key to business success in a rapidly evolving market is harnessing the available data through a sophisticated forecasting platform and plan for continuous improvement.

NielsenIQ was looking for a solution that would enable higher category forecasting accuracy, provide ongoing reporting to track performance, and enable strategic planning across their platforms. NielsenIQ specializes in global measurement and data analytics and is the definitive source for retail and consumer intelligence.

Maintaining competitive edge

As an industry leader, NielsenIQ is always striving for an extra edge to drive their business forward, stay ahead of the competition, and continue to be the trusted adviser to the world’s leading consumer goods companies and retailers in an ever-changing business landscape.

Integrating strategic planning

Our experience in engineering bespoke solutions through our integrated cross-market AI-based suite of algorithms meant we were the ideal partner to stand alongside NielsenIQ, and help them approach their decision making with confidence that they could pass on to their own clients.

Fractal’s Foresient, an AI forecasting and planning platform on AWS, generates forecasting models and forecasts at speed with high accuracies. Armed with this solution, we began by looking at historical reporting which allowed us to learn more about NielsenIQ’s categorisations, and the way that NielsenIQ works with its clients to provide the data they need to make actionable business decisions.

Understanding market disruptions

Alongside this, we considered other sets of associated data that could also affect how consumers reach their purchase decision, including short, medium, and long-term impacts that can cause market disruption, for example, Promotions; Prices; World events; Even the weather!

Our automatic data pre-processing and feature selection can be significantly more accurate than simple or manual forecasting, giving NielsenIQ the confidence to forecast for any eventuality.

We approached the challenge by:

Step

• Understanding the problem
• Data preparation
• Forecasting Iterations

Description

• Problem statement
• Performed sanity checks, completed missing data, and harmonized data.
• Created multiple iterations using the AI/ML forecasting engine.

Outcome

• High-quality, consistent data.

Optimizing forecasting operations with scalable infrastructure: To ensure robust and scalable infrastructure for our application for end-to-end forecasting operations and to help businesses focus on ROI, we leveraged several key services.

Higher forecasting efficiency for actionable insights

Foresient generated forecasts for five categories across the United Kingdom and three categories across Ireland, with enhanced accuracy, which delivered actionable insights.

The long-term impact

Flexible forecasting and integration with Foresient

NielsenIQ could access visual forecasts on the Foresient user interface, use the integrated API, or download the data via CSV to work alongside their current workflows and business applications. Comparing forecasts with actual values at different hierarchy levels across time ensured that bias and accuracy metrics were considered as part of the overall analysis. The available options demonstrate how Foresient can seamlessly integrate with existing workflows, offering the additional insights needed to differentiate and excel.