Considering the fact that while businesses continue to evolve, they look for a comprehensive platform which could cover all of their processes and methodologies, and enable them to access and analyze the actionable information for making sound decisions. DemandLink came into existence to cater to the need of enhancing the efficiencies of businesses.
Founded in 2008, DemandLink provides customizable web-based BI solutions for businesses of any size across all industries. It delivers accurate and actionable insights and analytics, particularly for sales, demand planning and replenishment. Its tools leverage daily sales and inventory data, machine learning and the power of the cloud to provide the most accurate forecasts in the industry. The company exemplifies its uniqueness by providing precise predictive analytics at high-processing speeds. Its vision is not only to bring unique solutions to each challenge or industry, but also to customize its solutions with a distinctive view for each individual user that will quickly and accurately provide answers to today’s business questions.
Continuing to Evolve
Since its inception in 2008 on a fairly small scale, DemandLink has continued to evolve in learning how to manage strong year over year growth. It had to scale up quickly, while maintaining its commitment to quality. As its applications expand and user base increases, it introduces and continually innovates practices for architectural design, project management, and testing/QA. Focusing on hiring the right individuals into the right roles and allowing the team to operate within their particular expertise has also been essential to its success.
Customized Offerings
The DemandLink team offers customized tools as its machines can learn any industry or business. Its expertise is in agricultural and seasonal product industries, but its AI tools track and assess any variable that affects the buying decision.
DemandLink tools connect and apply a robust data set of 35,000 climatic, demographic and economic factors and attributes for sales clustering and forecasting. This includes daily local market weather, unique product attributes, market demographics, and its audited daily POS data feed. It is most accurate at store/item level forecasting, performing at over 90 percent accuracy. Metrics like price sensitivity, and features like clustering are embedded into its sales and replenishment applications.
An Elite Team
The team at DemandLink has over 70 years of combined experience in Demand Planning, Replenishment and Merchandising in the seasonal and intermittent goods industries. It is committed to research on new developments and new machine-learning models. This team is led by John Garren, the CEO and Co- Founder and Robin Cross, the CFO, Research Director and Co-Founder. John leads the company’s direction, strategy, growth initiatives, people’s development and culture, and oversees all aspects of DemandLink operations. Prior to co-founding DemandLink in 2008, John was a National Account Manager and Replenishment Manager at Kraemer’s Nursery, where he began his career as a Replenishment Analyst in 2005.
In particular, Robin also serves as Assistant Professor-Senior Researcher in Applied Economics at Oregon State University. Robin applies insight from his research focus areas, which include Cognitive & Behavioral Analysis, Evolutionary Computing, Machine Learning, and Wine Economics. Through his research work, Robin has partnered with Oregon State University, Harvard University, Oregon Health Sciences University, University of Maryland, and multiple national and global retailers.
Partnering with Customers
To begin with, DemandLink comes through the challenge of overcoming the reluctance to allocate funds for BI spend. The customers want to feel comfortable about their expense for forecasting solutions. Therefore, the company partners with its customers to hone in on the why and what is the return on that spend. Once customers are users, its next biggest challenge is to break the reliance on spreadsheets and to blend the tribal and institutional knowledge with a more automated process. Businesses can build the most complicated business intelligence system, make it look and operate as intuitive as possible, and yet the most powerful tool built to date is Microsoft Excel.
DemandLink has experienced that there is a dependency, and culture around that dependency to be able to manipulate data at the customers’ fingertips. The human element of changing user’s habits and the change in culture required has been the company’s biggest challenge yet. It overcomes that by working closely with its customers, gaining insight and feedback as often as possible.
Steering the Futuristic Approaches
DemandLink has been successful in helping its customers take risk in their businesses. Data helps to minimize risk in forecasting and navigating the future in the best possible way. In the future, DemandLink sees a greater shift to more embedded machine learning across all platforms, and less dependence on spreadsheets. The industry will see more accessibility to business intelligence, interactive data visualizations, and more competitors with higher data quality. DemandLink will stay informed and up to date on the latest innovations and continue its focus on research to launch new and even more accurate systems leveraging machine learning technology.
Satisfied Customers
“DemandLink is much more than just a service provider. We consider them an integral part of our company who is fully invested in our business and our success. Their reporting and replenishment platforms have helped us maintain consistent year over year sales growth of complex retail programs. The intuitive user interfaces make it easy for our team to accurately manage data and make correct business decisions. And, the DemandLink support team has always been readily available to give technical assistance immediately. Overall, DemandLink has provided the tools to help us reach our full potential, and to grow our business.” – Chris Montgomery, Young’s Plant Farm
