Demand forecasting is essential for today’s Consumer Goods organizations. It allows you to optimize stock, reduce waste, enhance profitability, and so much more. Many companies are still stuck in siloed spreadsheet chaos, but you don’t have to be. The Snowflake AI Data Cloud provides the scalability, flexibility, and security well-suited to the unique challenges of demand forecasting and beyond.
Here are five ways Snowflake can elevate your demand forecasting – and how Hakkoda’s technical and industry expertise can help CPG companies unlock its full potential.
1. Real-Time Data Integration for Accurate Forecasts
- Benefit: CPG companies can pull data from various sources (POS, inventory management, market trends) in real-time, allowing for rapid adjustments to demand changes.
- Why Snowflake: Unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data together with near-infinite scale, robust data-sharing capabilities, and open formats (i.e. Iceberg tables), Snowflake enables seamless, scalable integration.
- How: Hakkoda’s expertise in data architecture can help design and implement efficient real-time data pipelines on Snowflake, ensuring that various teams have access to the most accurate, up-to-date data for agile decision-making.
2. Improved Forecast Accuracy with Advanced Analytics
- Benefit: Forecast accuracy increases when CPG organizations apply machine learning to analyze historical sales and external factors.
- Why Snowflake: Snowflake gives you the power to work in SQL, Python, or Java, and run your preferred libraries with Snowpark, allowing you to train and deploy your own predictive models directly, minimizing errors.
- How: Hakkoda has proven recipes to help organizations scale the analytics maturity curve by deploying these models on Snowflake and fine-tuning them to improve forecast accuracy across diverse product lines and seasonality cycles.
3. Scalable Demand Models That Grow with the Business
- Benefit: CPG companies can start with basic predictive analytics and evolve to complex AI models as they scale.
- Why Snowflake: Snowflake’s elastic scalability allows businesses to expand their models without incurring high costs.
- How: Hakkoda guides CPG clients through scalable architecture planning, helping to develop models that meet their current needs while building in flexibility for future growth – also ensuring a low time-to-value with innovative AI and LLM engineering solutions. For example, Hakkoda was able to help a Fortune 500 food consumer products company improve their forecasting run time by nearly 30% by fine tuning queries, improving ingestion patterns, and implementing modern architecture approaches in Snowflake.
4. Enhanced Collaboration Across Teams and Partners
- Benefit: Demand forecasting requires alignment across sales, supply chain, finance, and even external partners.
- Why Snowflake: Snowflake’s data-sharing capabilities provide secure, instant data access to both internal and external stakeholders.
- How: Hakkoda can unlock custom data-sharing frameworks on Snowflake, ensuring teams and partners have consistent, secure access to forecasting data, leading to more aligned, informed business decisions across the board. y tool in amplifying a company’s analytics potential, building on the value of ERP insights to power more reliable, context-enriched, and sophisticated capabilities spanning the whole enterprise.
5. Lower Costs by Streamlining Inventory and IT Overhead
- Benefit: Accurate demand forecasting helps CPG organizations optimize their inventory, reducing overstock and minimizing costly stockouts, all while improving service levels for customers.
- Why Snowflake: Snowflake’s separation of storage and compute, and its fully managed service capabilities (automated cluster management, maintenance, and upgrades) make it extremely cost-effective for managing complex data operations.
- How: Hakkoda’s Snowpro-certified consultants help identify areas where demand forecasts can impact inventory costs and design Snowflake solutions to optimize processes, ultimately lowering overall operational expenses. Learn how we’re doing this at world-class organizations like Blue Yonder.
Building Demand Forecasting Solutions on Snowflake with Hakkōda
For many Retail & Consumer Goods organizations, demand forecasting on Snowflake delivers the speed, scalability, and collaboration needed to stay competitive. By partnering with Hakkoda, CPG businesses can leverage industry expertise to tailor Snowflake’s capabilities to their unique needs. Demand forecasting is more than just a tool – it’s a pathway to increased agility, cost reduction, and proactive decision-making.
Ready to take top challenges in your industry head-on with a data consultancy that understands your goals? Talk to one of our experts today.