Forecasting as a Service

Forecasting workloads for scheduling optimization

To define ideal workforce staffing levels, it's important to create an understanding of the drivers behind workforce and skills needs. 

For retail these typically include forecasts of store visitor volumes, goods flow and forecasts of sales/sales potential.

In healthcare, staffing demand variations can be affected by forecast weather, such as slipperiness which impacts accident rates. 

After identifying the right demand drivers, we can then select the optimization parameters such as maximizing profitability, minimizing overtime, or enhancing customer service availability during busy time windows.

Financial planning and budgeting

Accurate financial planning and budgeting are fundamental to every business. These tend to be very time consuming manual processes, and can be greatly enhanced with predictive analytics for improved accuracy and speed.

With the help of Houston's forecasting service, companies can enhance their financial planning and budgeting processes with accurate rolling forecasts for metrics such as revenues, profits and payroll expenses across selected time periods. 

Forecast results can be produced as flat files for to be loaded into reporting structures and consumed by financial planning systems. Results can also be visualized in interactive dashboards with clients' preferred BI tools. 

Product demand planning and distribution optimization

Houston's Forecasting service can be applied to product inventory forecasting and optimization down to the level of individual locations.

Forecast accuracy is improved by enriching historical sales patterns with pricing, promotions, location demographics, product features, website traffic, weather and more. 

Houston Analytics applies machine learning models and optimization engines to produce accurate forecasts for product demand by each category and individual location. These outputs can be consumed via your existing management systems.