Colleague computer as future buyer

Baumax is introducing a new forecast-based supply management system in a first few test stores. Orders in future are not to be dealt with by store purchasing managers or staff alone, but with the help of a database in central offices. The procedure involves more than 3.3 million article-store combinations. Using as a basis the numbers of items sold, the computer forecasts the volume of sales that can be expected for every article. It also takes into consideration factors such as price changes, advertising promotions and seasonal effects. The system developed by the data warehouse specialist NCR Teradata converts the sales predictions into ordering proposals and routes them into the merchandise information system. Only two per cent of the ordering proposals are expected to be subject to any manual intervention.