Predicting Tomorrow: Industrial Forecasting at Scale

Jimmy Broomfield (Target Corporation)

Have you ever wondered how supply chains make decisions about purchasing and transport? Or perhaps you've stayed up at night wondering how energy companies plan for customer demand. Time series forecasting is a major component used to help business teams solve these problems. In this talk, I'll share my career journey in the world of industrial forecasting. We'll touch on the topics of data preparation, time series models, accuracy metrics, high level architecture, and compute/time constraints.

Jimmy graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2019 with a PhD in Math and joined Ecolab's advanced analytics team where he primarily worked in the field of time series analysis and forecasting.  During his time at Ecolab, Jimmy made contributions to the enterprise's time series classification framework by introducing novel wavelet and frequency based features.  He also served as a team lead with the responsibility for architecting, building, and validating a modern supply chain forecasting system for Ecolab's industrial chemical distribution.  Jimmy recently made a career transition to the demand forecasting team at Target where he hopes to continue his journey toward understanding industrial forecasting challenges and solutions.