Engagement formats

How engagements are shaped

Most firms sell time. We sell a decision that gets better, so the shape of the work follows the size of the question. Three formats, each with a written hypothesis at the start and a measurement plan at the end.

Decision Audit

Two weeks with your data, your P&L and the eight people who actually make the call. You leave with a written view of where better forecasting changes an outcome — and where it plainly would not.

  • Interviews with decision owners across three functions
  • Data readiness assessed against the decisions that matter
  • Ranked opportunity list with value and effort estimates
  • A written diagnostic of 20 to 40 pages, not a slide deck
  • A recommended sequence for the next two quarters

Build Sprint

Production pipelines and models, shipped in fortnightly increments against an accuracy bar agreed before anyone writes code.

  • Fortnightly releases into your environment, on your stack
  • An agreed accuracy bar with a written definition of done
  • Pipelines, models and semantic layer under version control
  • Monitoring, alerting and a documented rollback path
  • Handover pack written for your engineers, not for us

Embedded Practice

For organisations building a durable capability rather than one model. We sit inside your team, ship alongside your engineers, and agree the exit plan in month one so the end is never a surprise.

  • A named principal accountable for the whole programme
  • Quarterly roadmap and value review with the sponsor
  • Coaching, code review and hiring support for your analysts
  • Exit plan written at month one and executed at the end
Service 01

A forecast earns its keep when it changes what you order, staff or price.

Demand, revenue, risk and capacity models that hold up at horizon. We build to the horizon your decision actually needs rather than the one the tooling defaults to, and we report error where it costs money instead of on average.

  • Hierarchical demand models at SKU, store and region, properly reconciled
  • Intermittent and new-product forecasting where history is thin
  • Scenario and range outputs, with the confidence interval stated in units
  • A backtesting harness that scores every release against the incumbent
  • Weekly accuracy reporting tied to service level and working capital
Scope a forecasting engagementSee the forecasting project
0.685WMAPE, 13-week holdout
1,344SKUs forecast

Read from 01-demand-forecasting/run.py when this page was built — 738 lines. What that project imports and calls, not a list of everything we know.

  • argmax
  • clip
  • column_stack
  • concatenate
  • cos
  • diff
  • errstate
  • expm1
  • hstack
  • isfinite
  • log1p
  • median
  • ones
  • percentile
  • pi
  • repeat
  • sin
  • sort
  • unique
  • vstack
$632,383double counted, surviving de-duplication
19 of 31contract rules fail

Read from 02-data-governance/run.py when this page was built — 1,148 lines. What that project imports and calls, not a list of everything we know.

  • Grouper
  • Timestamp
  • agg
  • api
  • assign
  • astype
  • drop_duplicates
  • dropna
  • duplicated
  • fillna
  • groupby
  • idxmax
  • isin
  • reset_index
  • set_index
  • sort_values
  • transform
  • value_counts
Service 02

Governance fails when it is a policy. It works when it is a default.

Operating model, architecture roadmap and the governance to keep it honest. We write the target state, cost it, sequence it and name the person accountable for each domain — before anyone signs a licence.

  • Current-state assessment of platforms, spend and duplicated reporting
  • Target architecture with a costed, sequenced 18-month roadmap
  • Operating model covering roles, decision rights and funding
  • Domain ownership, quality SLAs and a stewardship forum that meets
  • Build-versus-buy positions written down, with the reasoning attached
Talk to us about data strategySee the governance project
Service 03

Pipelines that survive a reorg, a rename and a new head of data.

Warehouse, transformation and semantic layer built for change rather than for a demo. Tested, documented, version-controlled and boring in the best sense: an estate a new engineer can safely change in their first week.

  • Ingestion and transformation in your warehouse, under version control
  • A semantic layer that makes one metric mean exactly one thing
  • Test coverage on every model, with CI that blocks a broken merge
  • Freshness, volume and schema monitoring with owned alert routing
  • Cost control through partitioning, incrementality and a monthly spend view
Review your data estate with usSee the warehouse project
108tests on every build
1,024,826fact rows, reconciled to source

Read from 03-analytics-engineering/run.py when this page was built — 1,178 lines. What that project imports and calls, not a list of everything we know.

pandas only — 18 names.

  • Index
  • Timestamp
  • agg
  • astype
  • cumcount
  • date_range
  • drop_duplicates
  • dropna
  • duplicated
  • fillna
  • groupby
  • isin
  • merge
  • read_csv
  • reset_index
  • set_index
  • sort_values
  • to_period
51.2%variance caught by a naive rule
34.0%caught by our own rule

Read from 04-decision-intelligence/run.py when this page was built — 826 lines. What that project imports and calls, not a list of everything we know.

  • MultiIndex
  • Timestamp
  • agg
  • astype
  • date_range
  • diff
  • dropna
  • fillna
  • groupby
  • isin
  • reindex
  • reset_index
  • rolling
  • set_index
  • shift
  • sort_values
  • to_period
  • transform
Service 04

Most dashboards go unused. That is a design problem, not a training problem.

KPI trees, board-grade reporting and the rituals that make numbers get used. We start in the meeting where the decision is actually made and work backwards to the metric, then delete whatever nobody opens.

  • A KPI tree running from the P&L down to a metric a team can move
  • One board-grade pack with a named owner for every number on it
  • Decision logs: what was decided, on which number, and what followed
  • A retirement plan for the reports nobody has opened this quarter
  • A facilitated operating rhythm — weekly, monthly, quarterly
Rebuild your reporting rhythmSee the decision project
Service 05

A model in a notebook is a hypothesis. A model in production is an asset.

Models in production with monitoring, retraining and a clear rollback path. We ship fewer models than we are asked to, and we retire the ones that stop paying for themselves — the kill criterion is written before the modelling starts.

  • Problem framing and a written kill criterion before any modelling
  • Feature store and a reproducible training pipeline
  • Champion and challenger deployment with automated retraining triggers
  • Drift, bias and performance monitoring with an on-call owner
  • A model risk file your auditors and second line will accept
Put a model into productionSee the ML project
0.757ROC-AUC, temporal split
2011-04month drift fired

Read from 05-ml-production/run.py when this page was built — 1,015 lines. What that project imports and calls, not a list of everything we know.

  • Timedelta
  • Timestamp
  • agg
  • astype
  • clip
  • date_range
  • dropna
  • fillna
  • groupby
  • isin
  • isna
  • qcut
  • rank
  • reset_index
  • sort_values
903SKUs with significant elasticity
-$7,424 to $13,66690% range, spanning zero

Read from 06-pricing-elasticity/run.py when this page was built — 828 lines. What that project imports and calls, not a list of everything we know.

  • Timedelta
  • agg
  • astype
  • clip
  • dropna
  • fillna
  • get_dummies
  • groupby
  • isin
  • merge
  • nlargest
  • reset_index
  • sort_values
Service 06

Discount is the fastest lever in the business and the least governed.

Elasticity, promotion effectiveness and margin recovery you can bank. We measure what your promotions actually caused, then hand commercial teams guardrails they can price inside without asking permission every time.

  • Own-price and cross-price elasticity by category and channel
  • Promotion effectiveness with a proper incrementality read, not a lift chart
  • Price and discount guardrails wired into the quoting workflow
  • Markdown timing and depth optimisation for end-of-life stock
  • A margin bridge that shows exactly where each point of margin went
Find your margin leakageSee the pricing project
Deliverables

What you actually get

Four things leave with you on every engagement, whatever the format and whatever the service. None of them is a slide deck and a goodbye.

A written diagnostic

Twenty to forty pages of argument. What we found, what we recommend, what we would not do in your position, and what it costs you to be wrong about each one.

A production repository

Your repo, your cloud account, your credentials. Pipelines, models, tests and CI, documented well enough that a new engineer ships a change in their first week.

Runbook and monitoring

Alert thresholds, on-call ownership, retraining triggers and the rollback path. Written for the Tuesday morning when something breaks and none of us are in the building.

An adoption programme

Training for the people who use the number, a decision log for the meeting where it gets used, and a measurement plan that survives our departure by at least a year.

Compare

The three formats, side by side

Fee models differ because risk differs. Outcome-linked means part of our fee sits against the accuracy bar we agreed in writing before the first sprint.

Comparison of the three Predictify Analytics engagement formats by duration, fee model and final deliverable.
FormatTypical durationFee modelEnds with
Decision Audit2 weeksFixed fee, agreed up frontA written diagnostic and a ranked opportunity list
Build Sprint8–16 weeksOutcome-linked to the accuracy barProduction models running in your environment
Embedded Practice6–12 monthsRetained monthly, reviewed quarterlyYour team running the whole thing without us
Before you brief us

Questions we get asked in the first meeting

You do, outright, from the first commit. Work happens in your repository and your cloud account wherever possible, and the intellectual property transfers to you as it is created rather than on final payment.

We keep no copy of your data after an engagement closes, and the deletion is confirmed in writing. We reuse our own generic tooling and methods across clients; we never reuse your data, your models or your feature definitions.

No. Predictify Analytics has taken no reseller commissions and holds no technology partnerships. That independence is the whole reason a recommendation from us is worth reading.

In practice we work across the major warehouses, orchestration tools and BI layers, and we will happily tell you that the platform you already own is good enough — which is the answer more often than vendors would like.

No, and waiting for one is usually the more expensive choice. A Decision Audit needs interviews and a sample of data, not a finished platform.

What we will not do is build a forecast on a foundation that cannot be refreshed on a schedule. If the data cannot arrive reliably, fixing that is the first piece of work, and we will say so before you sign anything.

We do not guarantee accuracy, and you should be wary of a firm that does. What we agree instead is an accuracy bar: a specific metric, measured on a specific slice of your data, against your current method as the baseline. It is written down before the first sprint.

Every release is scored against that bar in a backtesting harness you keep. The number that matters is the one measured on your data, in your environment, against what you do today.

Alongside them, in the same repository, in the same stand-up. We take the modelling work that needs a specialist and a clear runway, and we hand it back documented.

Your engineers review our pull requests, not the other way round. If a member of your team wants to learn the modelling side, we pair with them deliberately — that transfer is written into the plan, not left to goodwill.

Handover is a fortnight of its own, not a final email. Your team runs the pipeline and the retraining cycle with us watching, we fix what breaks, and the runbook is corrected wherever reality disagreed with it.

Ninety days later we return for a measurement review: did the decision improve, and did the value show up in the P&L. It is a fixed part of the fee and it is not optional.

Not sure which of the three fits?

Send us the decision you are trying to improve — not the tool you are considering. We will tell you in writing which format fits and what it would cost, within one business day, and we will say so plainly if the answer is none of them.