Case Study: Large International Confectioner Company achieves 15% Easter sales lift and 15–40% inventory reduction with Cloudera

Intel and Cloudera Improve Company’s Predictive Analysis Abilities and Boost Sales

A large international confectioner faced the perennial retail challenge of predicting store-level consumer demand for seasonal holidays like Easter so it could optimize inventory, packaging and upsell offers across thousands of locations. With social and digital signals accelerating trend changes, sales and marketing teams needed faster, more accurate forecasts to reduce markdowns and inter-store transfers while improving campaign targeting.

The company deployed a Cloudera-based operational data store integrated with SAP BW, SAP HANA Smart Data Access, Cognilytics and SAP Lumira, running ETL and historical processing on Hadoop and hosting on Virtustream for agility and cost control. The solution delivered real-time, geo‑segmented dashboards and predictive models that drove a 15% year‑over‑year increase in Easter sales, cut inventory 15–40%, improved inventory turnover by 3.5×, enabled cost‑effective end‑to‑end campaigns, and saved more than $3 million in software licensing.