Occubee is a SaaS platform for store and warehouse replenishment based on sales forecasts calculated using artificial intelligence. We speak with the company’s CEO, Kamil Folkert PhD, about the readiness of Polish companies to implement AI and the business benefits that come from advanced data analytics.
On February 1, Occubee S.A. was founded. Previously, you operated under 3Soft S.A. What does it feel like to gain autonomy?
First and foremost, it’s a sense of satisfaction from reaching another milestone. The process of separating the new company was complex from a formal standpoint, but it marked the culmination of the organizational changes we had already implemented. It reminds me a bit of the situation when you move out of your family home – it’s often the result of a long process, maturing to the point of making the decision, and recognizing that it’s time to take responsibility for your next steps. With that decision comes excitement born of uncertainty, but also a readiness to take action.
What has the “move to independence” changed?
Today, we have the ability to set our own pace of development for the company. At the same time, we’ve gained a clear identity, which affects how potential investors perceive us. We are a SaaS company, not a software house building an innovative product alongside providing dedicated IT services.
You mentioned investors. In November 2022, you joined forces with Warsaw Equity Group. How do you evaluate this collaboration?
It was undoubtedly a key moment in the development of Occubee, and I can’t imagine what our reality would look like without this collaboration. From the investors, we receive multifaceted support, including in areas such as team building, mentoring, optimizing customer acquisition processes and implementation, as well as an analytical approach to our financial model.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve received from investors?
Every company faces the challenge of defining its target customer group. Given Occubee’s vast potential to support companies across various retail and manufacturing sectors, it was hard for us to resist the temptation of reaching out to many industries at once. The advice to narrow our focus and more precisely define our market was definitely the most important piece of advice our investors have given us so far.
Since we’re talking about customers, how do you assess the readiness of Polish companies for an AI-driven revolution?
Fortunately, implementing a tool that supports process automation and decision-making based on artificial intelligence, like Occubee, is not a revolution. We deliberately designed the system with integration and data exchange in mind, separating data in the cloud and allocating computational resources independent of the client’s infrastructure, to ensure maximum process consistency. In practice, implementing our platform does require some effort related to data preparation and understanding the generated results. However, it remains non-invasive in relation to the rest of the steps involved in store or warehouse replenishment. Thanks to Occubee, our clients can optimize processes they’ve often worked on for years, but now with better data, automatically calculated, and supported by independent infrastructure.
One might get the impression that today, companies offering AI solutions are popping up like mushrooms after the rain. What sets you apart?
Indeed, everything today seems to be presented as AI-based. In practice, this field has many branches and directions in which it is developing. We use artificial intelligence in the context of sales and demand forecasting, which, in some retail sectors like FMCG, directly answers the question of how many units of a given product will sell in a specific store within a certain time frame. On the other hand, in industries like fashion, it approximates sales potential, which is an essential element of the algorithms used for automatic replenishment.
For our clients, we create unique predictive models – parameterized and trained based on their data in the most granular form, i.e., even individually for each product-store combination. This provides the best results in the picking recommendations and supplier orders we generate, but it also requires working with large data sets. In practice, we automate a process that requires making millions of decisions daily. There are very few companies that can meet this requirement while not demanding that clients reorganize their business processes.
Automatyzacja, o której wspominasz, jest dla retailerów szansą na zwiększenie wydajności, wzrost zysków i redukcję kosztów. Czy przynosi inne, może mniej oczywiste, korzyści dla biznesu?
Tak. Occubee – dzięki temu, że wszystkie procesy w mniejszym lub większym stopniu bazują na generowanych z użyciem AI prognozach – pozwala zastąpić działania reaktywne proaktywnymi. Na przykład rekomenduje wysłanie konkretnych towarów w optymalnej ilości do konkretnych sklepów celem uniknięcia out-of-stocku zanim jeszcze zostanie przekroczony minimalny poziom stocku sklepowego (nie mówiąc już o wyprzedaniu się ostatniej sztuki danego produktu w sklepie). To pozwala uniknąć utraconej sprzedaży i utrzymać optymalny zapas towaru w sklepie.
The automation you mention offers retailers a chance to increase efficiency, boost profits, and reduce costs. Does it bring other, perhaps less obvious, benefits for the business?
It’s very tempting to dive into designing new functionalities, but right now, we’re focused on delivering the highest possible value for our clients within the current solutions. With each implementation, we uncover new insights in the data we process and generate. Some of this data is not yet directly available to our clients on the platform, and we want to make it accessible in the most useful way for business users, without requiring advanced analytical skills. We have a huge potential to tap into here, and that’s where we’re concentrating our efforts.
The interview was published on the Mycompanypolska.pl portal.
