International toy manufacturer improves sales forecasting with automation

In an increasingly globalized market, companies selling clothing, toys, and specialized food products must work with an extensive network of resellers and thousands of individual distributors.

This includes managing stock and evaluating sales data across multiple regions, languages, and currencies. Our customer manufactures and sells toys around the world via branded stores, major conglomerates, and smaller retailers.

“The market is shifting from brick and mortar to ecommerce, and Covid has only amplified that”
Data Engineer, Business Intelligence Team

With so many sales channels, their Business Intelligence team struggled to build sales forecasts that would accurately reflect global conditions as well as the unique requirements and fluctuations within regional markets. Collecting data required manually retrieving consumer information and operational metrics, such as inventory and sales data, from retailer portals. The process was slow and delays in delivering these market insights could impact the customer’s agility to flex production to meet demand.

Better forecasting required faster, accurate data retrieval.

Leapwork is a scalable way for the Business Intelligence team to build automated processes that will extract data from many retailer portals and synthesize it into comprehensive reports. These are then delivered to the global ‘insights engine’ for analysis.

“It was very important to pick a tool that members of my team could also use, that wasn’t super complicated or required a lot of coding”
Senior Data Engineer

Thanks to Leapwork’s easy-to-use visual automation builder, our customer’s business intelligence teams can quickly automate the process of gathering data from retailer portals and update those processes quickly as needs change. Crucially, the global insights engine receives data faster and more reliably and can transform this data into insights that inform strategy.