Unexpected consequences of the weather on your shelves

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It’s impossible to change the colour of the sky. However, thanks to weather analytics, companies can now curb the effects of climatic events. Here’s how.
Climatic conditions naturally affect demand for products and services. They can also entail costly consequences, such as shortages or excesses of stock. Here too, digitisation, analytics and Big Data is changing everything.

Weather at the service of predictive analysis

In many sectors, weather forecasting is often been underused in areas where it actually makes sense – for example, dynamically adjusting the manpower requirement, or the appropriate quantity and types of product to put on the shelves. Even insignificant seeming changes in the weather can entail significant consequences in diverse areas of business.

The Weather Company , an IBM Business (TWC) has joined forces with IBM and moved beyond delivering forecasts for consumption by the general public. IBM is providing actionable intelligence as a service to inform companies’ strategies & tactics in areas such as marketing, sales and supply chain. All from combining traditional climate data sources such as, satellite photos and institutional meteo systems with hyperlocal sources such as huge numbers of home-installed sensors, smart phone sensors, aeroplanes and also ships. In short, leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) to create business value.

To really capture the business benefits from this rich source of data requires companies to be open to Exploration and Experimentation. The broad patterns are generally known, e.g. “we sell more ice cream on hot days”. But the much more granular underlying patterns are what allow companies to optimize their business. Underlying patterns such as; local differences between locations (enabled by hyperlocal weather data), different impacts for different product groups, or the difference in effects of specific ranges of temperature, humidity, or day light conditions. Exploration using Advanced Analytics techniques and tools to mine the available data can uncover these patterns and often surprise even the seasoned expert. Experimentation in the field will then help learn the best response to optimize business results.

Recently me and my team were involved in exactly such explorations, a.o. for a fashion retail company and we showed how some quick work can assess the business potential and focus efforts in the right direction.

With The Weather Company Data for IBM Bluemix, meteorological data from The Weather Company can now easily be incorporated into your own IBM Bluemix applications. The data covers every form of climatic event, including rainfall, snowfall, barometric pressure, wind and storms. You can find out more about the Bluemix Weather API here.

Mando Rotman