SuperPlan: Forecasting and Demand Planning

Overview

Demand planning is the process of planning demand for a product or service in order to facilitate decisions about inventory levels, production capacities, staffing, and more. Demand planning is considered an essential step in supply chain planning.

Project Objectives

Our project leverages the M5 Competition’s Walmart sales dataset, which covers several stores in multiple states in the US. The M5 is one of the most well-known forecasting competitions in the field of demand planning. We explore top performing models from the M5, particularly LightGBM, and state-of-the-art deep learning models like Temporal Fusion Transformer against industry standards such as Triple Exponential Smoothing, in order to provide key insights to business users including:

Which aggregation levels do the models forecast best?

• Are the models effective at capturing price/promo changes?
• And do the model perform well in common business scenarios not covered by the M5?