What is the Metyis True Demand solution?​

True Demand is a proprietary AI-powered demand forecasting solution that harnesses trend information from diverse data sources across regions and channels to predict consumer behaviour. By quantifying the demand underlying the actual sales, the innovative solution empowers brands to make informed decisions that considerably improve demand-supply balance.

By using the power of data to connect trends, consumer behaviour and product sales, True Demand is more than just a sales forecasting tool. It is an integrated solution that helps retailers avoid overproduction or underproduction, subsequently allowing them to avoid understock or overstock scenarios.

Identifying trends by gathering data from a wide range of sources is critical to enabling accurate demand sensing and forecasting. The Metyis True Demand solution is a breakthrough approach that helps brands do that, thereby empowering them to make informed decisions across multiple functions and departments.

What makes True Demand truly unique

The Metyis True Demand solution is more than just a sales forecast solution. While sales forecasting is the process of estimating how much revenue a business will generate by selling its products and solutions, True Demand predicts how much of a certain product or service is likely to be bought in the future given the availability of the product.  

Three components of our True Demand solution help brands make accurate demand predictions and optimise their production, inventory, and distribution strategies.  

Artificial intelligence: True Demand is anchored on two AI elements, one designed for attribute extraction from unstructured data (images and text) and another that is used to recognise patterns and enable actual forecasting from raw data. Using AI to make demand predictions means increased efficiency, accuracy, and ease.  

Integrated Data: True Demand is based on a data mart engineered to integrate all relevant inputs generate accurate predictions of consumer demands accompanied by a product similarity assessment and a trend analysis.

Dashboards: The True Demand platform contains a set of dashboards created to generate results for different user groups.

Unlocking the benefits of optimal stocking with True Demand

With the exponential increase of product options in the competitive landscape, understocking of goods leads to lost revenue and customer loyalty. Overstocking, on the other hand, increases overheads and inventory management issues, especially when inventory clearance requires significant discounts.

The Metyis True Demand solution successfully helps retailers avoid both overstock and understock situations. In the short term, accurate demand predictions help retailers allocate their products to the right geographies and channels to optimise sales and reduce overstock, and in the long term, it can facilitate optimal production and ordering decisions.

The importance of trends

To accurately predict demand — both short-term and long-term — data from diverse sources is required. One key factor to enhance forecasting is trend information as it indicates consumer behaviour in the future. Hence, a truly data-driven approach can close the gap between demand and supply and lead to a better user experience, an increase in conversions, a decrease in supply chain costs and better margins.

To underscore the pivotal role of trends in the fashion landscape, the following statistics emphasise their substantial impact on our estimates:

• 55% of GenZ consider recommendations from influencers as one of the most important factors in their purchase decisions.

• 50% of millennials and 57% of GenZ discovered a new product on Instagram in the past 3 months.

• 96% of US fashion brands are on Instagram and 50% of Instagram users follow brands.

Making accurate demand forecasts using diverse data 

To make a precise prediction of their consumer demand, brands must develop a demand forecasting model that relies on diverse data sources. This includes internal and external data, as well as structured and unstructured data.

Once collected and prepared, data sources are used to train two demand forecasting models. One for short-term and the other for long-term forecasting purposes. The short-term forecast provides real-time insights into expected stock utilisation and recommends actions to meet the True Demand. The long-term forecast predicts True Demand for the next season, guiding data-driven assortment decisions by highlighting products to add or remove.

The graph below illustrates the potential data sources for a fashion industry client.

Making an impact in the short and long run via True Demand

By leveraging AI, diverse data sources, and an integrated dashboard, the Metyis True Demand solution provides invaluable benefits for retailers across different industries. In the short term, it helps sell more specific products by helping retailers stock them in the right countries and channels. In the long run, our solution reduces the consequences of overstocking and understocking by aiding retailers to produce quantities closer to consumer demand.  

At Metyis, we take demand forecasting to the next level. We develop and execute customisable True Demand strategies to help optimise production, warehousing, logistics, and distribution processes, and continue adding significant value to businesses in the long run.