Copyright: Tabea Damm
Can you imagine what it would be like to predict the future? To know what is about to happen and optimize your buying decisions in real-time? Think of the impact it would have on your business decisions or even the time it would save.
We are happy to announce that from now on you can.
Easy4Pro has just released its new feature: the "Market Price Intelligence". Our customized Artificial Intelligence forecasts the spot market price in real-time with 82% accuracy.
Since 2017, our business intelligence provides an aisle analysis to compare our customers' purchase price with the market's purchase price per lane. This analysis is based on past performance and allows industrial buyers to adjust their purchasing strategies. We wanted to go further and add our predictive insights to the analysis. We have been beta testing our machine learning prediction model for a few months now. We started with a 1-day spot price prediction, then expanded it to 5 days with 82% accuracy and up to 10 days with a very accurate prediction. We look forward to expanding from 10 to 20 days in the near future.
Why is regular freight different than spot / non-regular and harder to forecast?
Regular freight is an annual contract that will be negotiated establishing an average price along the year, whereas non-regular freight is dependent on offer/demand law. Every day of the week there are different depending on:
- The market capacity
- Where it is picked up / delivered
- Means of transport
- Market transparency (have you reached the request of the most optimal carrier?)
All these data are combined, creating a multidimensional complexity that cannot be treated statistically because the samples become too small. For this, we trained a machine that is able to learn and extrapolate the "new/never seen" situations. Training this machine has been and will be an iterative process, getting better each time.
Our customers will all be able to compare their spot price not only to the spot prices immediately retrieved from our system, but also to the forecast market price trend today and for the coming days for a given vehicle, urgency category, transit time, and destination.
During the outbreak of the COVID -19 pandemic, we experienced high volatility in prices and realized more than ever the benefits of having an additional set of tools to help our clients achieve cost savings. In some weeks, we experienced an increase of approximately 15% of price versus the previous week along 2020 as a result of panic buying, which then dropped back even below the original price. So we decided that our customers should be able to forecast this and know in real-time whether the price offered by the carrier for a particular day, lane, and transit time is a competitive price or not.
Our Plan :
Market Price is from now on to be available to all our customers (who request to activate the option) to analyze in real-time the offers of their suppliers. At a glance, each user will be able to check if a price is too expensive and what price they should aim for. As the market price value is unique per shipment, it will be calculated in real-time per shipment request and will be visible as a reference price in the next step in the booking system.
This Market Price is also already usable to trigger a request to our customers' suppliers. The market price is then pushed to them as an indicator for their price offers.
With the data collected via the tool, we expect to be able to predict by the end of this year when our customers should make their shipping requests & give them real-time suggestions on how to optimize their purchases (tenders, groupage, planning, etc.) and will be part of the new Easy4Pro Logistics Consultancy Program.
To achieve this, we will continue to train our prediction engine, which learns from every broadcast submitted through our tool.
Below is an example on the given track of a shipment (Poland to Germany) with the predicted market price (in blue) compared to the real purchase price (in red) for a van shipment.
If you would like to test our beta version, please do not hesitate to contact us.