Demand intelligence In development
Smart reporting
You see the selling season before it arrives.
The problem: Demand is seasonal, the record of it already exists, and nobody can read it in time. A distributor watches an antiparasitic line spike in the same weeks it spiked last year — and learns about it by running out: the shelf is empty, the supplier's lead time is six weeks, and every order a veterinary clinic places that month goes to a competitor. That sale was not lost on price or on service. It was lost to a jump sitting unread in last year's figures while the reorder was decided from memory. Upstream, the manufacturer makes the mirror-image mistake, committing a production run to the lines that moved last quarter rather than the ones the coming season will ask for. Every industry with a seasonal curve and a lead time in front of it carries this gap; pharmacological distribution is simply where it costs the most, because the shortage is counted in prescriptions that cannot be filled.
A web application that turns a company's own sales and order history into a demand signal it can plan against — at SKU level, week by week, against the same weeks of previous years. It serves both sides of the same shelf: the manufacturer scheduling a production run, and the distributor raising a purchase order that has to clear a supplier's lead time before the season arrives. Veterinary pharmacological lines are the clearest case — antiparasitics, antibiotics and vaccines move on a seasonal curve set by herd cycles, husbandry calendars and weather, and the decision to make them or buy them is taken months before the demand appears.
Under the hood: The demand signal is arithmetic on the company's own transactions before it is anything cleverer, and every figure opens onto the orders behind it — a number nobody can trace is a number nobody acts on. Aggregation runs in PostgreSQL over indexed, partitioned history rather than in the application, and the scheduled jobs that rebuild each report run there too. Calendars are handled properly: retail weeks, fiscal quarters and a moving Thanksgiving do not line up with calendar dates, and a year-on-year comparison that drifts by a few days is worse than none at all. Where a curve is genuinely too noisy to read — a new line, a broken series, a one-off bulk order distorting a week — a model ranks what deserves a planner's attention. It does not replace the arithmetic, and it does not place orders.
- SKU-level demand history, read from the systems already in use rather than re-keyed
- Like-for-like comparison: this week against the same week last year, this season against the same season, aligned by calendar rather than by date
- Seasonal curves per line and per category, derived from the company's own history — not an industry average
- Year-on-year movement flagged early, while a purchase order can still clear the supplier's lead time
- Cover against lead time: what is on hand, what is on order, and when it runs out at the current rate
- A production-planning view and a procurement view, built from one history
- Reports that rebuild themselves on a schedule and arrive before the decision, not after it