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原文摘要

Business-to-business (B2B) companies develop and deliver a one-of-a-kind product in response to a client's orders. To prepare resources for development beforehand, companies estimate dates when they will receive orders from clients in their sales process, called scheduled order dates. However, dates when the companies actually receive orders can differ from the scheduled order dates. This difference increases costs in the development. If the difference could be forecasted before receiving orders, companies could optimize their resource preparation. Towards reducing the costs, we introduce sales delay forecasting, a novel task of forecasting delay days from the scheduled order dates during sales process where sales representatives (sales reps) interact with the clients to receive orders. Sales delay forecasting is challenging because the sales process progress inherently involves uncertainty and depends on the client's willingness to order. To address this task, we propose confidence features which represent sales reps' confidence as a proxy measure of the client's willingness to order. To represent it, our method extracts dates of future sales events anticipated by sales reps from textual reports. To consider whether the confidence objectively looks reasonable, we also introduce status features which describe sales process status based on current date and past events. In experiments using real sales data, our method achieved a 16% lower mean absolute error compared with a feature-based baseline similar to a prior work. Moreover, our method outperformed non-feature-based baselines using large language models, indicating that it is crucial to explicitly create our features.