How AI-led Demand Forecasting Helped Church Brothers Farms Optimize Order Fulfillment

Summary of the Impact

Church Brothers Farms, a top US-based agri-products company used ThroughPut AI’s demand forecasting capabilities to achieve the following results:

• Short-term forecasting accuracy improved by up to 40%
• Enhanced forecast accuracy of the best timelines, workflows, and order fulfillment routes 
• Minimized excess stock and carrying costs

The detailed case study is as below.

About Church Brothers Farms

Church Brothers Farms is a leading vertically integrated, family-owned, US-based vegetable producer, supplier, and processor that prioritizes customer experience and provides the highest quality produce in an increasingly competitive and volatile market. 

Church Brothers Farms grows over 40,000 acres and ships more than 50 million cartons on more than 4,400 trucks annually, with 8 or more pallets per truck for better coverage, efficiency, and sustainability for its nationwide clientele.

Demand Forecasting Challenges

In today’s increasingly unpredictable and aggressively competitive markets, Church Brothers Farms was looking to consistently deliver more value in the face of steadily dwindling resources – budgets, labor, time, assets, and weather – while continuing to drive shareholder value. 

From this perspective, the company’s top challenges were:

Volatile Demand 

As Church Brothers Farms looked to further enhance customer experience in a hostile market, it wanted to proactively predict demand at both a product and product group level. In addition, it wanted to use homegrown metrics to identify and rank products for prioritized distribution and order fulfillment, thus optimizing resources and effort.

Most importantly, it wanted to utilize ThroughPut AI to most accurately forecast demand to enable more effective capacity estimates and planting schedules.

Lack of Granular Visibility and Actionability for Sales Performance to Avoid Revenue Leaks 

Given the seasonality of demand in the space, Church Brothers Farms needed full transparency into sales at the SKU level to be able to pinpoint top-selling products and categories, as well as their underperforming counterparts. 

For instance: In which months did a particular product witness the maximum and minimum sales, and why? What was the overall impact on demand in each case? What was the product’s contribution margin in the month when its sales peaked and what were the root causes that drove it?

Inadequate Inventory Control 

Church Brothers Farms also wanted to identify the commodities in its product mix that accounted for the majority of its sales and margins. The company wanted to adopt a demand-driven, proactive, intelligent strategy to planning so that it could shift from a make-to-stock approach to a make-to-order approach to production, thus minimizing wastage of product, as well as inventory space and unnecessary costs across the entire value chain.

In other words, the company was looking to stock, produce, sell, and distribute just the right amount of product – at the right price – to ensure that it always fulfills demand without excess waste or margin erosion.

AI Demand Forecasting Solution

ThroughPut AI performed a detailed analysis of current and historical data across over 60 commodities, 25 value-added products, and 490 product groups. Sales volume and revenue were analyzed by commodity, product group, and customer against a backdrop of external influencing factors for granular insights into performance.

ThroughPut AI automatically analyzed data from diverse sources and revealed insights and recommendations to key questions such as:

• Sales frequency: How often over the past period and year has a particular customer expressed purchase interest? 
• Sales volume: How many equivalent cartons has this customer purchased and will they most likely purchase in the future? 
• Price and revenue: What was the overall price variance for this customer over the past year and how does one best manage that? 
• Distribution: How many commodities has this customer purchased and will they most likely purchase in the future? 
• Specialty sales: What percentage of the commodities bought were value-adds and how much contribution margin did they account for across each customer?

Minimization of Disruptions 

ThroughPut also analyzed demand seasonality and other external factors to minimize disruptions. Supply chain disruptions in the agriculture industry are many and varied – high demand uncertainty and seasonality, product perishability, safety and quality compliance, volatile commodity prices, complex production constraints, challenging logistics issues, weather, innovative product introductions, seasonal promotional activities, and fluctuating consumer tastes, to name a few.

ThroughPut provided data-driven insights into the impact of each of these influencing parameters, thus enabling Church Brothers Farms to make informed business decisions in real-time that best served their customers, shareholders, and varied stakeholders.

Data-driven Demand Sensing

ThroughPut also analyzed Church Brothers Farms’ demand by day of week and time of year to identify when the highest and lowest sales occurred, as well as the demand impact in each case. With ThroughPut’s highly accurate AI-driven demand sensing capabilities, Church Brothers Farms was able to leverage real-time demand data with ThroughPut AI’s demand forecasting module to predict near-term buying patterns and generate precise, actionable insights and recommendations to manage demand.

ThroughPut took into account internal, as well as external demand influencers, to identify demand trends, which accelerated short-term forecasting accuracy by up to 40% or more compared to traditional time-series forecasting used by their contemporary industry peers.

Inventory Management and Replenishment

With ThroughPut’s AI-powered analytics, Church Brothers Farms discovered that just a few of its commodities accounted for a majority of its sales from 2017 onward and that many of its top-selling products were also responsible for the highest margins.

These insights, in addition to leveraging near-term data to predict short-term demand, enabled Church Brothers to optimize its supply chain end-to-end, thus ensuring that stock is always available at the right quantity, at the right location, at the right time (and most importantly, at the right cost) to fulfill the demand, keep customers happy, and maximize profitability.

Impact of AI Demand Forecasting on Agribusiness

As Church Brothers Farms continues to transform its supply chain with ThroughPut, it will be able to forecast the best timeline, workflow, and routes for order fulfillment – ahead of time, and with ever-increasing accuracy. In addition to improving its demand and supply planning, Church Brothers Farms is managing its inventory more effectively than ever before by minimizing excess stock and carrying costs. With greater visibility and actionability across its supply chain, the company can now better optimize production capacity and inventory to fulfill demand in the most effective, efficient manner possible. 

Should You Choose ThroughPut AI for Demand Forecasting?

ThroughPut AI offers improved accuracy in demand forecasting using advanced analytics and decision intelligence capabilities that lets you predict demand in near-term and respond to the fluctuations in real time and with agility.

Some of the reasons why ThroughPut AI is a preferred choice are:

1. ROI in 90 Days

One of the top advantages you’ll experience with ThroughPut AI is that it starts delivering returns in just 90 days. Unlike massive digital transformation projects that take years to demonstrate ROI, ThroughPut AI is built to identify areas with the maximum improvement potential in the shortest time – enabling you to see results faster.

2. Work with Existing Data

ThroughPut AI integrates seamlessly with your existing data, so there’s no need for a complete overhaul of your data infrastructure. It works effortlessly with your spreadsheets, ERP systems, and other databases, saving you the cost and time typically associated with deriving valuable insights. You’ll start benefiting from the tool’s advanced capabilities right away, gaining fresh insights without the stress of extensive data migration or reformatting.

3. Customizable for Your Industry

Designed with versatility in mind, ThroughPut AI can be customized to meet the specific needs of your industry. Whether you’re in supply chain, retail, logistics, cement, or another sector, the tool addresses the unique challenges and opportunities specific to your business. It’s designed to align with different operational models and complies with the regulatory requirements of your business ecosystem.

4. Patented Algorithms for Analytics

ThroughPut AI leverages patented algorithms to drive data analytics and optimization. These proprietary algorithms offer you accurate and actionable insights from complex data sets, boosting your ability to predict outcomes, identify patterns, and recommend actions with precision. Unlike generic analytics tools, these advanced algorithms give you a competitive edge, helping you make data-driven decisions that reduce waste, increase profitability, and improve efficiency.