Data-driven forecasting powers smarter growth at Carma Coffee
Carma Coffee operates a network of automated, self-service coffee kiosks across Northern Ireland and London, offering organic, high-quality beverages. As the business expands, it sought data-driven tools to streamline operations, improve stock management, and enhance customer service across multiple locations.
The Challenge
Rapid expansion across multiple locations made managing stock levels and predicting demand increasingly complex for Carma Coffee. Existing spreadsheet-based systems were time-consuming and offered limited insight into evolving customer preferences. Without a scalable, data-driven approach, the business risked overstocking or running out of popular products, impacting customer satisfaction and increasing waste. Carma Coffee needed a solution to better understand purchasing trends, optimise inventory, and streamline supply chain operations, supporting sustainable growth while minimising operational inefficiencies.
The Solution
Carma Coffee partnered the Hartree Centre Northern Ireland Hub to build a predictive, analytics-driven system for stock and demand management. Using Python within Google Colab, the team processed historical sales data with Pandas and NumPy, and visualised insights via interactive Plotly and Dash dashboards.
A predictive model using Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) was developed to forecast daily and weekly demand, with 7- and 14-day rolling sums smoothing short-term fluctuations. The dashboards revealed detailed patterns in customer behaviour, sales trends by time and location, and service uptime, while the model highlighted locations and times with higher failed orders.
This integrated solution enables Carma Coffee to make proactive decisions around stock replenishment, reduce missed sales, and improve operational efficiency. It is scalable to support additional locations and new product lines, embedding analytics into the core of daily operations.
Aaron McGilligan, Founder, Carma Coffee
“The HartreeNI Centre has helped us turn data into a real advantage - from predictive dashboards to smarter forecasting. It’s already improving efficiency and gives us the credibility we need as we scale and showcase Carma Coffee to larger customers.”
Project Impact
The collaboration between Carma Coffee and the HartreeNI Centre resulted in a tailored solution that supports more informed, proactive decision-making. By combining interactive dashboards with predictive modelling, the project delivered a range of practical benefits for Carma Coffee’s day-to-day operations and future planning:
- Insightful Dashboards: A suite of interactive dashboards was developed to uncover detailed insights into customer behaviour, order trends by time and location, and service uptime across machines.
- Forecasting Engine: A predictive model was built to estimate weekly demand at each location, allowing the business to align stock levels more accurately with projected sales.
- Operational Efficiency: By identifying patterns in failed orders such as specific locations and times of day with higher occurrences, the model provides actionable insights to guide restocking and reduce missed sales opportunities.
- Cost Savings: Enhanced forecasting supports better inventory planning, helping to reduce waste and avoid the costs associated with overstocking.
- Scalability: The solution is flexible and designed to grow with Carma Coffee’s operations, accommodating additional locations and new product lines as needed.
Further Information
This work was completed as one of our data projects. Our projects are up to 12 weeks in duration. We will work alongside your business to scope your project, demonstrate proof of concept, and explore options to deploy it within your business. If you would like to learn more about the Hartree Centre Northern Ireland Hub and our Programme, please get in touch with us at: info@hartreeni.uk
Our Impact on UK Industry and Society
The Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation enables businesses to acquire the skills, knowledge and technical capability required to adopt digital technologies like super computing, data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing. The SME Engagement Hubs play a key role in offering targeted support for business challenges in their region, creating value and generating economical and societal impact for the UK.
