Grupo Fleury, one of Brazil’s largest diagnostic medicine companies, has created an automated demand planning management platform – the Fleury Forecaster – with the help of FICO^® Xpress Insight. Using this platform, Group Fleury has slashed the time needed to create a sales forecast. Forecasts have also become more accurate and granular in detail, with the overall margin of error now less than 10 percent.

For its achievements, Grupo Fleury has been recognised in the AI, Machine Learning & Optimisation category in the 2018 FICO^® Decisions Awards.

Grupo Fleury manages a robust demand planning process in order to appropriately allocate its 10,000+ employees at the necessary locations for the appropriate amount of time. In order to manage this complex process, Grupo Fleury must reconcile supply and demand as well as new product plans at both the detailed and aggregate levels.

“Our challenge was to adapt available technologies to managing demand planning processes for a diagnostic medicine business,” said Eduardo Bianchetti, manager of Pricing, Commercial Intelligence and Portfolio at Grupo Fleury. “FICO’s knowledge in operationalising analytics and optimisation was used to build a platform based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. We can now provide the most valuable information to our planning analysts, which facilitates overall decision-making. We are expecting significant cost savings through more efficient resource allocation.”

The Fleury Forecaster can show both real-time levels of demand and continuously updated demand forecasts across Grupo Fleury’s extensive medical services portfolio. The platform has dynamic dashboards that are important to make critical analysis of the results and that help with managing the forecast process. Having all this information contained in an integrated, user-friendly interface enables the company to identify its most pressing pain points, distinguish its best growth opportunities, and plan to effectively address and capitalise on each.

“Our team worked closely with Grupo Fleury to build a forecast tool with a powerful analytics engine,” said Alexandre Graff, general manager for FICO in Latin America. “This is an excellent example of combining classical statistical time-series models with AI / machine learning techniques and an intuitive user experience to improve speed and performance.”

FICO^® Xpress Insight is one of four core components of FICO^® Xpress Optimization. FICO Xpress Optimisation allows businesses to solve their toughest problems, faster, and with unprecedented accessibility by business users. FICO’s deep portfolio of optimisation options enables users to easily build, deploy and use optimisation solutions that meet their needs. FICO Xpress Optimization is part of the FICO^®Decision Management Suite.