Improving Forecast Accuracy to Streamline Bakery Operations

Graham’s Bakery produces high-quality baked goods for retailers and foodservice partners across Northern Ireland, Great Britain, and the Republic of Ireland. Known for innovation and strong customer relationships, the bakery continues to expand its product range while maintaining a commitment to excellence.

The Challenge

Graham’s Bakery experiences natural fluctuations in customer orders across products and clients. While internal forecasts exist, aligning them with actual sales patterns was challenging. Even subtle variations in order volumes can affect ingredient purchasing, production scheduling, and delivery planning. The bakery sought to refine forecasting practices to improve planning accuracy, enhance supply chain efficiency, and support long-term operational growth.

The Solution

The Hartree Centre Northern Ireland Hub conducted an exploratory analysis of sales and forecast data across a 12-week period. Three datasets were cleaned, standardising product names and dates, and consolidating records for analysis. Using Python, visualisations and statistical summaries highlighted weekly trends, top-selling products, and areas where forecasts diverged from actual sales. The outputs provided clear insights into forecast performance, recommended improvements in data consistency, and produced a clean dataset suitable for future predictive modelling. This initial analysis lays the groundwork for smarter, data-driven decision-making across the bakery’s supply chain.

grahams-bakery

Timothy Graham, Grahams Bakery

“The Hartree NI Hub analysed 12 weeks of sales and forecast data. Three datasets were cleaned, standardising product names and dates, and consolidated for analysis. Using Python, visualisations and summaries highlighted weekly trends, top-selling products, and forecast discrepancies. The outputs provided insights into forecast performance, improved data consistency, and produced a clean dataset for future predictive modelling, laying the groundwork for smarter, data-driven supply chain decisions.”


Project Impact

The exploratory analysis produced clear, actionable insights for Graham’s Bakery, including:

  • Visibility of Forecast vs Sales: Visualisations revealed differences between projected and actual sales volumes, providing a clearer picture of forecasting performance.

  • Improved Data Consistency: Standardising product naming and recording practices laid the foundation for more advanced analysis.

  • Readiness for Predictive Modelling: A clean, structured dataset was developed, suitable for training robust forecasting models in the future.

Building on this analysis, Graham’s Bakery can incorporate longer-term historical data to develop predictive models that forecast demand across products and customers. In the longer term, interactive dashboards and real-time forecasting tools can empower the team to respond quickly to changes, ensuring continued efficiency and customer satisfaction.

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.