Demand Forecasting for Industry 4.0: predicting discrete demand from multiple sources for B2B domain

Demand is the amount of certain product required by buyers at a point in time. Demand forecasting tries to predict future demand based on available information. It is considered a key component of each manufacturing company since improvements on it translate directly to resources planning, stocks and overall operations. In the context of Industry 4.0, industry digitalization provides an everincreasing number of data sources which can be consumed to gain visibility over all operations and used to optimize different processes within it. This also opens new possibilities into the field of demand forecasting, where multiple data sources can be integrated to get timely data for accurate forecasts. We describe an efficient approach for demand forecasting for discrete components B2B industry. The proposed approach provides as good or better forecasts as logisticians for most months in six months period and achieves savings considering all test months period