John Deere Harvests Accurate Sales Forecasts With Information Discovery
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Equipment manufacturing is an inherently capital intensive business and knowing the direction of the market three months sooner can save tens of millions of dollars in inventory costs every quarter, as well as better focusing marketing campaigns and sales incentives.

John Deere Waterloo Works, the world's largest producer of agricultural tractors, now has high technology help in seeing into the future.

By using Information Discovery's pattern-based approach to data analysis, Deere can now better forecast tractor sales. The data mining approach used by Information Discovery produces much better forecasts than traditional approaches, because it uses many more parameters in the pattern it uses. Good forecasts allow Deere to better manage its inventory, and make significantly better strategic marketing decisions.

Getting good forecasts is very important because the agricultural markets can be very turbulent from year to year. Retail sales can be affected by current and future farm-economic trends, crop prices and production levels, commodity futures, used equipment inventory levels, competitor incentives, consumer confidence, etc. Information Discovery's Retail Sales Forecasting application models these complex interactions and accurately forecasts equipment sales levels several months in advance.

Sales patterns are automatically identified and stored in a PatternWarehouse as well as the impact of industry factors such as cash receipts by farmers, crop-future contract prices, etc. The pattern-base is incrementally updated, ensuring that Deere business users always access recent sales patterns. Also since knowledge is so much more compact than data, the PatternWarehouse is only a fraction of the size of the database, allowing Deere to store many years worth of patterns with ease, providing Deere with an environment for long term corporate knowledge management.

The system is web-browser based and allows business users to immediately access both historical data and forecasts for the future months. Business users can freely access refined information on their intranet, obtain forecasts without needing a technical background, and access patterns of refined information with a point-and-click GUI.

For more information on the PatternWarehouse and other solutions offered by Information Discovery please visit: http://www.patternwarehouse.com or call (310) 937 3600.