New crop of vendors bringing innovation to demand forecasting, analyst says

Several new vendors are offering innovative, web-based means of forecasting retail demand and collaborating with suppliers, mixing both analytics and business process management in the same application, Gartner analyst Andrew White says.

“There’s a lot of innovation going on in this area,” White tells Internet Retailer. While some of the more established vendors are focused mostly on either analytics or business process management, relatively new vendors like TrueDemand Software, Quantum Retail and Blue Agave Software are providing both analytics and business process management, he says.

By comparison, older vendors like Retalix, Business Objects and SAS are strong on analytics, while others including i2 Technologies are focused more on business process management. The analytics applications provide the data retailers need to produce forecasts of what will sell and what they should order from suppliers, but the business process management systems provide the platform to share information and collaborate with suppliers, White says.

Vendors like TrueDemand and Quantum Retail let retailers gather useful analytics data and collaborate with trading partners on a single platform, White says.