ARMONK, N.Y., May 22, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE:
IBM) and its subsidiary The Weather Company today announced
IBM Weather Signals, an AI-based tool designed to help companies
predict how fluctuations in weather can impact business
performance, even months in advance. With this insight, businesses
can proactively adjust supply chains to help ensure accurate
inventory, staffing and promotional activities aligned with
anticipated changes in local weather conditions.
IBM Weather Signals uses Watson AI to merge weather data with a
company's operational data to create a model that can predict how
anticipated seasonal weather conditions, or even minor fluctuations
in temperature, wind chill or humidity, are anticipated to impact
business performance, right down to sales of individual product
categories at specific locations.
Integrating this insight into supply chains, companies can then
redirect inventory to meet anticipated changes in demand – for
example a fashion retailer can time the introduction of seasonal
clothing lines to the start of the seasonal weather or a tourist
attraction can anticipate how humidity might impact visitors'
willingness to stand in line and adjust staffing or pricing. These
insights can help increase productivity and reduce waste to
potentially add millions to the bottom line.
To help companies better integrate weather into their business
planning process, IBM Weather Signals' output can be used with
common analytics platforms like Tableau. This provides interactive
capabilities to model the correlation between weather and business
performance within the context of overall business forecast
planning, and within an intuitive dashboard environment, without
having to migrate data to a new platform.
IBM Weather Signals has applications across a broad range of
industries and is particularly relevant to industries that are
sensitive to changes in daily or seasonal weather conditions such
as retail, consumer packaged goods, services, hospitality,
entertainment and travel and transportation.
"Companies instinctively know that weather impacts their
businesses, but most rely on historical weather norms to make
assumptions about the future," said Kristen
Lauria, General Manager of Watson Media and Weather.
"Weather Signals provides powerful insight into the correlation
between real-time changes in weather and corresponding changes in
local business performance -- even months in advance. That insight
can potentially add millions to a company's bottom line."
IBM also recently announced Weather Decision Platform for
Agriculture, which combines AI, hyper-local weather data, and IoT
data to give farmers around the world greater insights about
planning, plowing, planting, spraying and harvesting.
IBM acquired The Weather Company in 2016 and has since been
helping clients from travel and transportation, to logistics and
supply chain, to better understand and mitigate the cost of weather
on their businesses. IBM Weather Signals and IBM Watson Decision
Platform for Agriculture are the latest innovations in IBM's
efforts to make weather a more predictable business consideration.
The combination of rich weather forecast data and IBM's AI and
Cloud technologies provides a unique capability, which is being
leveraged by agriculture, energy and utility companies, airlines,
retailers and many others to make informed business decisions.
About The Weather Company, an IBM Business
For more
information,
visit https://newsroom.ibm.com/the-weather-company.
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SOURCE The Weather Company, an IBM Business