API Group

API Group, a large printing business operating across the US and UK, faced a structural demand planning failure driven by its largest customer. That customer's materials forecasts were frequently and dramatically inaccurate, leaving API Group's supply chain team with an impossible trade-off: hold excessive inventory to absorb forecast volatility, or risk missing agreed delivery windows. They chose to hold high stock — yet still failed to meet on-time delivery targets consistently. The consequences compounded: capital tied up in warehouse stock, overtime costs to rush correct colours and styles into production, chronic wastage from misprinted or surplus inventory, and deteriorating customer satisfaction. In a high-mix, short-lead-time printing environment, this kind of demand unpredictability is particularly damaging because SKU diversity makes manual buffer management unsustainable at scale.

API Group engaged Kortical to own the full data science lifecycle — from raw historical data through to a deployed machine learning application. Kortical's AI Cloud platform was used to build a highly tuned time series forecasting model: feature engineering was handled via Kortical's SDK to generate the necessary lag variables, then the platform's AutoML engine generated and ranked tens of thousands of candidate models per week on a leaderboard, surfacing the highest-performing configuration. Optimisation techniques were then layered on top of the forecasting model to quantify the trade-off between two competing objectives — reducing overstock versus improving on-time delivery rate. Three distinct inventory strategies (lean, reliable, and balanced) were modelled and presented to business stakeholders. A human-in-the-loop UI allowed demand planners to overlay their own domain knowledge onto the ML forecasts, incorporating real-world factors such as storage capacity, supplier lead times, seasonal demand shifts, and upcoming campaigns. The entire solution was delivered by a lean team of one data scientist and one domain expert.

API Group adopted the balanced inventory strategy, achieving simultaneous improvement across both dimensions that had previously been in direct tension:

• 11% increase in on-time delivery — improving fulfilment reliability and customer satisfaction
• 8.5% reduction in over-stock — releasing working capital previously tied up in warehouse inventory

For comparison, the lean strategy would have cut overstock by 35% but introduced significant delivery risk; the reliable strategy would have pushed on-time delivery up by 15.6% but reduced overstock by only 0.4%. The balanced approach delivered meaningful gains on both metrics without sacrificing either. The demand planning team adopted the solution directly through the forecast UI, enabling ongoing human-AI collaboration rather than a black-box handoff.

• Frame the problem as a trade-off, not a single objective — modelling lean, reliable, and balanced strategies gives business stakeholders genuine choice and increases buy-in.
• AutoML at scale accelerates model selection — generating and ranking tens of thousands of candidate models surfaces solutions that manual experimentation would miss.
• Human-in-the-loop design drives adoption — a UI that lets planners overlay domain knowledge on ML forecasts bridges the gap between algorithmic output and operational reality.
• Lean delivery teams are viable — a single data scientist paired with a domain expert is sufficient when the platform handles the heavy lifting of model generation and evaluation.
• Address the root data quality problem — when upstream forecasts are the source of variability, replacing them with an internal ML model can outperform the original supplier forecast entirely.