Smarter Price Forecasting for Better Procurement Decisions

Accurate price forecasting is critical for effective procurement planning. With the Procurement Price Forecasting Skill, Aera delivers 99% forecast coverage and over 90% reduction in manual effort. It empowers procurement teams to plan with greater confidence, speed, and agility, enabling a shift from reactive firefighting to strategic, data-driven decision-making.

The Challenges: Incomplete Data, Manual Work, and Planning Risk

Many organizations still rely on manual workarounds and inconsistent data when building their price forecasts. These stopgaps introduce risk, delay planning cycles, and increase operational cost — especially for long-tail or newly introduced items. Common challenges include:

• Incomplete price forecasts for specific material-site combinations, particularly low-frequency items.
• Complex data management, with outdated or partial contract data that requires time-consuming manual cleanup.
• No reliable forecasts for new materials, where historical pricing simply doesn’t exist.
• Manual similarity mapping, where teams rely on subjective judgment to match materials. This approach is error-prone and doesn’t scale.

Left unaddressed, these issues slow procurement cycles, undermine supplier negotiations, and elevate risk in financial planning.

The Aera Solution: AI-Driven Forecasting at Scale

Aera, the decision intelligence agent, uses the Procurement Price Forecasting Skill to automate and enhance the forecasting process from end to end. This capability transforms procurement planning into a data-driven, intelligent system of action by:

• Smartly grouping materials based on the availability of pricing data — full, partial, or none.
• Applying tailored forecasting logic using the most appropriate model for each group: time series models for historical data, regression for partial data, and NLP-based similarity matching for new materials.
• Generating context-rich forecasts by integrating contract terms, pricing, currency, and other relevant data.
• Writing forecasts directly into planning and transactional systems, enabling real-time use and operational alignment.

Aera combines a range of advanced AI techniques — including Holt-Winters, ARIMA, TF-IDF, cosine similarity, and multidimensional analysis — to ensure that every material is forecasted with the right approach. This reduces uncertainty while eliminating reliance on manual judgment.

Case Study: From Planning Bottlenecks to Forecasting Confidence

A leading consumer packaged goods (CPG) company had long struggled with incomplete material price forecasts. Planning delays, uncertainty in supplier negotiations, and elevated cost risks were common. Manual workarounds for missing or inconsistent data only made matters worse, particularly for long-tail items where historical context was sparse.

After deploying Aera with the Procurement Price Forecasting Skill, the company automated its forecasting process, applied AI-driven models suited to each data scenario, and pushed accurate, site-level forecasts directly into its planning systems. Within just a few months, the results were transformative:

• 99% forecast coverage across the material line
• >90% reduction in manual effort
• >85% forecast accuracy

These improvements accelerated planning cycles, supported more confident supplier negotiations, and significantly reduced procurement risk.

Why Aera: What Sets It Apart

Aera transforms procurement forecasting from a manual, error-prone task into a streamlined, intelligent process powered by AI and automation. It replaces complexity and guesswork with speed, accuracy, and consistency, so teams can focus on making better decisions, not managing data.

• Unified decision intelligence: Aera integrates data harmonization, forecasting logic, and intelligent matching into a single solution.
• AI-augmented workflows: It improves procurement efficiency with composite AI and machine learning across the full procurement lifecycle.
• Closed-loop execution: Forecasts are automatically pushed into operational systems, accelerating and standardizing decisions at scale.

With Aera, procurement teams can move beyond reactive work and toward strategic, data-driven decision-making — confident that their forecasts are accurate, timely, and actionable.

Ready to transform your procurement forecasting?