This client is a large chain of restaurants based in the east coast. Given soaring café operational costs, they wanted to develop a forecast system that can produce causal driven sales and traffic forecasts to improve cafe management and production planning and scheduling. We helped them develop sophisticated forecasting algorithms to develop forecasts at the half hourly level by café which are then allocated using an intelligent product mix algorithm to arrive forecasts at the menu level.

The restaurant business is event driven and sales are highly influenced by weather, business closures, holidays as well as marketing promotions and features. We have developed a comprehensive process for event management and planning and the methodology to use them as causal drivers in the demand plan.

• Our causal forecast models are helping them achieve within in 5% to 8% MAPE on daily revenues and traffic.
• TClustering of cafes that serve each other result in better models to improve predictability.
• Cafes can distinguish between baseline and incremental volume for better café management based on event interventions.
• Cafes can better plan and schedule using more accurate hourly traffic forecasts and product level forecasts for the revenue items sold.