Long Term Demand Forecasting
We worked with Boral to build an optimisation engine to assist in the quantitative and justified decision making required to forecast demand around facility sizing for capital investment decisions
“Biarri provided us the with the rigorous quantitative modelling that we required to make major capital and operating decisions. Their easy to use model framework helped us to understand analyse the complexity associated with varying demand on our facilities’ supplies and catchment areas. The Biarri team made the mathematics easy and the results understandable.”
Paul Dalton
EGM, Boral Construction Materials (Vic/Tas/SA)
Business Need
As one of Australia’s largest and most experienced Construction Materials suppliers, Boral operates five quarries near Melbourne that supply aggregates, dust, and road base to locations around Melbourne.
Boral wanted to accurately forecast their increased demand and build a business case for upgrades to facilities. They required an appropriate modelling approach to understand how forecasted demand changes would impact inventories and its catchment areas. They also required a solution that was easy to access, quick and easy to use and able to analyse multiple scenarios.
Our Approach
- We worked closely with the team at Boral and their domain experts to identify their specific requirements for a modern, facility sizing application.
- When we understood their requirements we we were able to rapidly develop and deploy a custom tool on top of the Biarri Workbench that catered for Boral’s specific requirements.
- The tool that we created allowed Boral to forecast demand via a web- based Facility Sizing tool, with built in heat map visualisation of Boral’s facilities and their expected customer bases for each of the next fifteen years.
The Results
- Being connected to the right data, at the right time, Boral has far greater control over their demand forecasting decisions.
- The Facility sizing tool allows the Boral team to visualise the future demand via custom heat map visualisations for the next 15 years.
- By optimising the assignment of customer demand to one of Boral’s five facilities, Boral can now make better capital investment decisions through improved forecasting capabilities.
