Alinea Forecast Engine - Intellichoice

Carolina Manufacturer's Services (CMS) provides promotional management solutions including: coupon, rebate and trade transaction settlement; promotional analysis and forecasting; and customized data capture and reporting.  CMS processes over 3.5 billion transactions annually for 650 U.S. consumer packaged goods manufacturers.

Challenge

Each year billions of promotion coupons are redeemed for all kinds of consumer products.  This involves several billion dollars of promotional expenses.  Brand and product managers who plan and manage these promotions use an award winning Web-based application built by Stratapult, called Alinea™. This application allows CMS and its clients to develop a promotion's budget by providing an accurate, simple forecasting tool to predict a promotion's redemption pattern.

The initial forecasting engine created forecasts based on existing promotions statistically grouped in a set of decision trees. These groupings frequently combined promotions with a wide range of dissimilar parameters. While statistically valid, these groupings were not intuitive to some CMS clients. These clients requested a tool that would provide greater control over the set of promotions used to forecast a new promotion's budget. CMS had the following goals for the development of such a tool:

• Provide CMS clients with a more intuitive, easy to understand option for generating a pre-promotion budget.
• Provide marketing professionals the tools needed to apply individual product knowledge, market space and trade standing to the generation of a pre-promotion budget forecast.
  

Solution

To provide clients with the desired flexibility, CMS added the IntelliChoice™ product to the forecasting pages of the award winning Alinea application.  IntelliChoice provides users the ability to create a pre-promotion budget based on a similar match between the new promotion parameters and a set of existing promotions in the database. The enhancements made to the system provide users more options in developing a forecast. Users have several options to further refine a forecast:

• If fewer than three exact matches are found, the IntelliChoice parametric search tool is displayed. With this tool, users may broaden a search by de-selecting less important search parameters such as distribution date and quantity, face value, product moved, etc. To aid in decision making, users are also provided the number of additional promotions that would be used to develop the budget forecast for any given set of selected parameters.
• Users can also further select or de-select specific promotions to be used in the generation of the budget forecast. This allows for user knowledge of previous promotions to be applied to new budget forecasts.
  

System Architecture

The IntelliChoice forecasting module is a Web-based system with the forecast engine residing on a back-end server.  Users from more than 650 CMS clients can access IntelliChoice through a Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. 

The search tool is an ASP page that utilizes XML and JavaScript to predict the search results given the user's selection or de-selection of promotion details used in the promotion search query. The forecast engine, written in VB6 and COM+ and interfaced with ASP pages, resides on a back-end server and retrieves forecast pre-generated decision tree XML files and default forecasts for each leaf node stored in the SQL Server 2000 database.

Software Used (Back-end Engine)

Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Visual Basic
COM+

Impact

IntelliChoice offers users a tool to mix both the art and science of forecasting.  Brand owners have the ability to apply their knowledge of promotions and outside factors along with scientific algorithms to customize the forecast of future offers. The tool empowers CMS clients to take control of forecast budgets and make better business decisions. Additionally, it improves CMS's customer service and perception as a leader in the marketplace.