Pluto7: Using machine learning to accurately predict demand

Introduction

How do you accurately predict demand for your products, so that you ensure to have the apt required inventory? If there emerges an urgent need of buying the inventory, you lose money. If you play it safe with limited inventory then your ranking will be affected, reducing your ability to reach potential customers 

Pluto7’s Planning in a Box is right there to solve your inventory dilemma, built to help supply chain and operations teams. This solution The Software as a service (SaaS) is playing a major role in helping customers of all sizes, increase online sales across various online platforms,  forecast precise demand to manage inventories weeks and plan for potential disruptions across different supply chain nodes. 

Why Pluto7?

Pluto7 is a tech-enabled solution company,  primarily focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Planning in a box is a powerful solution, built on a strong supply chain analytics application — it leverages the power of Smart Analytics, and machine learning to help customers of all sizes – enterprises, small, and medium businesses – sell online and plan their inventory and forecast demand more efficiently.  

Pluto7’s Planning In A Box, leverages Google Machine Learning Engine and amplifies system performance and reliability with Google Cloud Platform.

Solutions

Planning in a Box is a Pluto7’s ML solution that helps to bring end-to-end visibility to supply chain, accessing to real-time planning and collaboration with all the stakeholders involved.

Our team worked on evolving the solution’s back-end system in order to stay efficient, so they started to migrate to Google Cloud Platform. It was all out of curiosity that the team wanted to understand how Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine could help deliver the most accurate demand forecasts to a company’s retail customers. 

Planning in a Box is built on a Docker container model and works with Google Kubernetes Engine to deploy the solution. As a consequence, the users can access the solution in the front end as well as applications that run in their own environment in the back end. The drive towards building this solution on Google Cloud Platform was to get beyond the stranglehold of performance and leverage  learning on a cloud platform that is cost effective and scalable. 

The data scientists of Planning in a Box were untied from the load of production issues and were happy to focus on getting more appropriate data sets into the ML model, to provide customers with higher visibility to their inventory data. 

When it comes to integration and enablement, the solution can coexist with your data sources and input from SAP, Netsuite, salesforce, and other IoT devices — it helps you make better supply chain decisions and can give you output in the same or desirable format as your input.

It can scale to any volume with the power of Google Cloud and can be accessed anywhere (Desktop/Mobile). PiaB helps organizations simplify the complexity of running multiple reports from multiple channels (dashboards) for different purposes.

Results

Planning in the Box delivers the most accurate demand forecasts to retailers. It enables the company to focus on new features and products development bypassing the production problems. The freedom to experiment with no risk factor along with stable, scalable and cost-effective services, Pluto7 was encouraged to expand its vision of Planning in a Box services. The major focus was complete inventory management solutions, giving full view of their inventory in warehouse, manufacturing and stores in addition to integrating their online channels including Amazon, Shopify, and eBay. 

Pluto7 had a vision of seeing their customers view their inventories at a click of a button, across the world, along with managing the distribution, all in one place and we successfully achieved this by our product, “Planning in a Box”.