Mi9 Retail and Planalytics Partner to Improve Demand Forecasting Accuracy

Mi9 Retail announces a strategic partnership with Planalytics, a provider of weather-informed demand analytics and insights.

Weather is a highly volatile, continuous, and directly impactful external demand driver for retail businesses. The weather influences where people go, the activities they pursue, and their buying behavior. Planalytics provides businesses with visibility into this critical demand information with metrics that isolate and quantify weather-based shifts in consumer purchasing.

By integrating Planalytics' weather impact insights into the Mi9 Retail demand forecasting solution, retailers can better position their businesses to both capitalize on sales opportunities and manage the costs created by variable weather patterns. The partnership bolsters Mi9's strategy of expanding third-party signals capabilities in order to help its customers adapt to future events and mitigate supply chain disruptions, according to Neil Moses, CEO of Mi9 Retail.

By incorporating weather information into their forecasts, retailers can realize annual forecast accuracy improvements of up to 30 percent for specific products, time periods, and locations. In the area of inventory optimization alone, these forecast accuracy gains translate into measurable benefits:

• As much as a 2% increase in total topline sales as the result of improved availability
• Up to 70 basis points of additional profit due to increased sales and reduced inventory costs (e.g., carrying costs, markdowns, shrink, etc.)

Several global brands in the fashion/apparel and cosmetics verticals have already decided to take advantage of this partnership and incorporate weather-driven in their existing Mi9 Retail environments.