Smart Forecasting for Today's Business Realities: Zeaware's Forecasting as a Service

For centuries, organizations have relied on forecasting to predict demand, a critical aspect of business planning directly impacting the bottom line. In fact, ancient civilizations, such as the Egyptians and Greeks, used rudimentary methods for predicting agricultural yields.

Accurate forecasts are crucial, as both over and under forecasting can lead to significant consequences, such as excess stock or lost sales opportunities. Traditional time series forecasting involves analysing historical data patterns to predict future values, often using models like ARIMA or Exponential Smoothing. While these methods are valuable, they have limitations, struggling with complex nonlinear relationships, adapting to sudden changes, and handling large datasets effectively.

Recognizing these limitations, many organizations are exploring smarter forecasting approaches, combining traditional methods with machine learning, such as neural nets. Some leverage platforms like Azure ML, Databricks or AWS to build forecast models. However, managing and optimizing these models over time presents challenges, especially in understanding the impact of changes or additional external data.

Zeaware offers a Forecasting as a Service solution designed to harness modern forecasting techniques while providing tools and skilled resources for effective model management and optimization. Their service includes a forecasting management toolset, featuring a model optimization process and visualizations of model performance over time, allowing drill-down and roll-up based on data hierarchies.

This service offers the advantage of keeping data within the organization's existing platform, with forecasts running in their environment using standard cloud toolsets like Azure ML and Databricks. Customers benefit from Zeaware's forecasting management toolsets, ensuring ongoing optimization and review for more reliable and accurate forecasts.

Zeaware’s Forecasting as a Service offering allows businesses to:

• Out-task the forecasting process. We will run, manage, maintain and optimise the forecasting process using a combination of our tools, techniques and skilled team.
• We test & optimise. We will run multiple tests and optimisations on your forecast data, and will help to tune your forecasts to produce optimal forecast outcomes.
• Improve Forecasts with Additional Data. Forecasts may be improved by augmenting the core timeseries data set with additional data sets. Zeaware Forecasting allows us to leverage data sets allowing more advanced forecast models to be built which don’t only depend on past values.
• Tools for managing adjustments. Demand planners have access to our web-based tools to track performance and make adjustments as required, capturing variance and supporting reasoning. Over time the accuracy of manual adjustments can be reviewed to ensure correct assumptions are being made.
• Flexible Forecast Export & Integration. Forecasts can be exported through the Zeaware Forecast web UI, or can be integrated into external system through APIs.

Recognizing the challenges many organizations have Zeaware addresses these evolving needs with our Forecasting as a Service solution, offering modern techniques, robust tools, and skilled resources for effective model management and optimization. This service not only streamlines the forecasting process but also empowers businesses to out-task, test, optimize, incorporate additional data, manage adjustments, and seamlessly integrate forecasts into their existing systems, ensuring ongoing improvement and reliability in forecast outcomes. With Zeawares, businesses gain a strategic edge in navigating the complexities of demand forecasting in today's dynamic business landscape.