Anyone interested in Forecasting as as Service?
Just curious given to know if people would be interested in testing out a forecasting as a service idea.
The idea is for you to submit a csv file with (Date, Sales ) values and the output would be to sales predictions for the next few weeks.
If interested in testing out the service please fill out the form https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScULtqQCRQklL-BGSA2hP2Ej_6zGO8m_IBmXsW3aXyW6kSJbA/viewform?usp=sf_link
Hey @shrikar I signed up. Happy to learn more about it as we collect a lot of data and have a few customers that might explore further insight.
Chat soon!
What are the sales predictions based on ?
The idea is that sales tend to have a particular trend just based on the day of week or month of year etc. And can be used to predict what kind of sales you would expect. This is a simple approach.
Another dimension is look if there were ads running, promotions running, store location to make it more sophisticated.
This is basically wrong in my experience, at least for software sales. It could be true for restaurants or brick and mortar stores, I don't know.
For software, you would want to integrate with some CRM or similar software to get ahold of the sales pipeline, and use that as your starting point for your forecast.
Also, if you want to something with some nice analytics/prediction code, you might find the problem of lead attribution a fun one. Solve that and you will do very well indeed :)
Javier that's certainly possible and can be more sophisticated. But not sure how many would be willing to share their CRM or sales pipeline data.
Could you give out some more information about the lead attribution? Do you have any data and what kind of solution you would like for that?
AWS just released this: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-forecast-time-series-forecasting-made-easy/
Not sure if it would be a tool or competition, but something to be aware of.
Looks interesting. This will probably be another tool that I will be using along with a few others. It really not easy for people to setup their own aws account and set it up.