Mitsui Chemicals Teams up With NEC and dotData to Trial AI-Based Price Change Forecasting

TOKYO and SAN MATEO, Calif., Sept. 28, 2021  — Mitsui Chemicals, Inc. has teamed up with NEC Corporation to trial an AI-based system for forecasting changes in the prices of specific Mitsui Chemicals products that are sensitive to market conditions. Based on the results of this trial, Mitsui Chemicals intends to work toward the full introduction of an AI-driven demand forecasting system to avoid losses caused by price fluctuations and increase profits through appropriate procurement, production and sales.

The trial was carried out using the dotData AI software platform developed by dotData, Inc., which automates all data science processes.

Background

Mitsui Chemicals has conventionally forecast trends in product demand from past price and profit trends, as well as from exchange rates and other data collated weekly, based on the knowledge and experience of the company’s business staff. However, as globalization has progressed in recent years, making forecasts that anticipate sudden changes in market needs has become difficult, necessitating optimal control of not only output but also raw material procurement costs and quantities.

Trial

Mitsui Chemicals selected for trial a number of company products that are prone to influence by difficult-to-forecast market conditions. The dotData platform supplied by NEC was used to analyze a diverse array of data, including daily and weekly inventory data for the products over the last few years, as well as plant operating rates and sales figures. dotData then automatically extracted the most valid of the innumerable potential features to build a high-precision price forecasting model.

Results

While there are still some areas requiring ongoing improvement, the trial revealed how dotData can be used for high-precision forecasting of the following month’s price for a given product, enabling Mitsui Chemicals to price products more appropriately based on market trends, formulate better sales plans, and execute procurement and production in accordance with those plans. Mitsui Chemicals anticipates that the platform’s adoption will lead to reductions in inventory worth several hundred million yen.

The trial also provided fresh business insights that were not readily apparent to human analysts, such as identification of a correlation between any changes in X and the price of Y.

“Amid increasingly intense global competition, Mitsui Chemicals intends to become more competitive via the digital transformation of demand forecasting, tapping into advanced automated machine learning technology. This move will speed up our efforts to achieve corporate transformation focused on a customer-driven business model and solving social issues by reducing procurement costs, cutting lead times, and reducing CO2 emissions through the optimization of distribution,” said Masao Sambe, executive officer, Digital Transformation Division, Mitsui Chemicals*.

“Through our partnership with dotData, NEC has supported numerous clients to date in achieving digital transformations. The combination of dotData’s market-leading technology and NEC’s consulting capabilities will not only support Mitsui Chemicals’ efforts to achieve innovative change but also contribute to resolving social issues through this initiative,” said Hideto Mori, Executive Director, NEC.

“We at dotData are excited to provide our high-precision AI-based forecasting and business insights to assist Mitsui Chemicals in its digital transformation and its efforts to solve the challenges faced by society. We look forward to achieving further progress with Mitsui Chemicals and NEC as partners in this collaboration,” said Ryohei Fujimaki, Ph.D., CEO, dotData.

About dotData

dotData pioneered AI-Powered Feature Engineering to accelerate and automate the process of building AI/ML models, to drive higher business value for the enterprise. dotData’s automated data science platform accelerates ROI and lowers the total cost of model development by automating the entire data science process that is at the heart of AI/ML. dotData ingests raw business data and uses an AI-based engine to automatically discover meaningful patterns and build ML-ready feature tables from relational, transactional, temporal, geo-locational, and text data. dotData’s scalable, flexible platform enables data scientists to discover and evaluate outstanding AI features; and empowers business intelligence professionals to add AI/ML models to their BI stacks and predictive analytics applications quickly and easily. Fortune 500 organizations around the world use dotData to accelerate their ML and AI development to drive higher business value.

dotData has been recognized as a leader by Forrester in the 2019 New Wave for AutoML platforms. dotData has also been recognized as the “best machine learning platform” for 2019 by the AI breakthrough awards; was named a CRN “emerging vendor to watch” in the big data space in 2019 and featured on CRN’s 2020 and 2021 Big Data 100 list; and was named to CB Insights’ Top 100 AI Startups in 2020. For more information, visit www.dotdata.com.

*Mitsui Chemicals established the Digital Transformation Division in April 2021. Focused particularly on business operations and supply chains, the Digital Transformation Division is working to speed up digital transformation efforts company-wide.

Source: dotData, Inc., NEC Corporation