Eveready Demand Planner Lighting, flashlights and batteries forecast jointly through the distributor indent

National demand: history and 12-month forecast

Note the shape. Q1 (Apr–Jun) is the peak and Q4 (Jan–Mar) the trough, every year — the inverse of most Indian FMCG books, because the seasonality here is weather- and festival-driven rather than incentive-driven. There is no fiscal-close loading to model. Teal ticks mark south-west monsoon onset, ochre ticks Diwali, pink ticks Vijaya Dashami.

Category forecast · next three months

The volume–value gap column is the point: LED categories grow in units while value stays flat, so a revenue-trained model under-orders them systematically and in one direction. The forward gap shown here is narrower than its FY24–FY26 peak, because management said pricing stabilised in Q1 FY27 — switch the LED realisation lever to see the regime move.

Rolling-origin backtest

There is no incumbent platform to beat. We found no o9, Blue Yonder, Kinaxis or SAP IBP footprint at Eveready, so the honest baselines are seasonal naive and the current planning number — an uncontested comparison, which is a commercial advantage on this account. Five origins at monthly, embargo set to the 8–14 week import and contract-manufacturing indent lead time.

Scenario levers

Modelled drivers, not sliders on the output.

Driver attribution

Method. Ablation deltas on weighted CRPS — retrain without the block, measure the loss. Not attention weights.