Transforming Category Management with Advanced Analytics: Lorenz Polska & DS STREAM Partnership
Challenge
Lorenz Polska operates at the heart of the B2B snack market, serving major retail chains while prioritizing modern trade channels.
The company’s strategic goals were to:
• Build world‑class analytical capabilities within commercial teams
• Automate complex assortment preparation for diverse retailers
• Deeply understand consumer purchasing behaviour
• Maximise gross margin contribution across the portfolio
• Reduce assortment management costs through automation
• Implement a robust, data‑driven promotion effectiveness measurement framework
Key considerations along Lorenz’s journey:
• Organizational focus: Analytics expertise was still developing internally, with teams balancing several parallel initiatives.
• Data landscape: Inputs varied in granularity and format, offering opportunities to harmonize datasets and enrich SKU‑level and promotional insights.
• Right-sized scope: Operating at gigabyte rather than terabyte scale, Lorenz’s needs were best met with tailored, efficient solutions rather than heavy big‑data infrastructure.
Our approach
We designed a modular, scalable, and pragmatic analytics ecosystem on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), carefully avoiding unnecessary complexity while ensuring future scalability.
Core solution components:
• Customer and product segmentation (K‑Means, DBSCAN, hierarchical clustering)
• SKU‑level demand forecasting considering seasonality and region (ARIMA, LightGBM)
• Price elasticity modelling (Bayesian GLM)
• Detection of product substitutes and complements via correlation and semantic analysis
• SKU portfolio optimisation using linear and quadratic programming
• Automated data integration (ETL in BigQuery) with interactive dashboards for business users
Implementation emphasized knowledge transfer and co‑creation. Each analytical module was paired with hands‑on workshops, enabling Lorenz’s team to independently enhance and expand the platform. Prototypes were built to be scalable and extendable, allowing future applications such as shelf analytics, integration with Nielsen data, and advanced pricing strategies.
The outcome
• Internal capability building delivers lasting business value
• Modular architecture accelerates delivery and simplifies scaling
• Pragmatic technology selection ensures cost‑effective, impactful results
• LLM‑driven semantic enrichment maximizes existing data value
• Agile, iterative delivery paves the way for new business insights
Our partnership with Lorenz Polska illustrates how advanced analytics, delivered with a consultative and category‑savvy approach, can transform assortment planning, pricing strategy, and promotional analysis for FMCG manufacturers.
By focusing on upskilling, modularity, and pragmatic innovation, Lorenz achieved measurable operational benefits and secured the in‑house capabilities required to lead Poland’s snack category in an era defined by data‑driven excellence.
Business Impact
• Superior sales forecasts. Machine learning models consistently outperformed manual sales estimates, improving demand planning accuracy.
• Promotional data enrichment. Integration of LLMs unlocked value from previously siloed promotion datasets.
• Automated assortments change detection deployed in selected retail chain stores, enabling faster market response.
• Sustained analytical capabilities: Lorenz’s team now independently develops and adapts platform features.
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