This new market data product — as it already does in its launch market, the UK — will provide retail sales and inventory data to improve supply chain management and cash flow.
The data is collected via the major POS systems, cleaned, organised and made useful via a dashboard that is configurable and responsive to each subscriber’s needs.
The central challenge and user-needs that the project addresses relate to information asymmetries between different actors in the bicycle industry supply chain. This impacts what is ordered, in what quantities, and at what costs.
Whilst efforts to reshore bicycle industry manufacturing to Europe gather momentum, with financial and policy support by the Commission and Member States, the European bicycle industry remains part of a complex global supply chain, with interdependencies with Taiwan and China in particular.
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The bicycle industry is complex, globally inter-connected and subject to shocks – like COVID, energy crises, etc. There is a lack of information on what is being sold, what is held in stock, and what needs to be re-ordered, designed and developed to meet shifting market needs.
By providing detailed real-time data linked to sales online and in-store, users understand demand and can forecast with far greater efficiency than existing solutions.
Benchmarked against the actual incurred costs and timescales for the product development for its launch market in the UK-only region, this is estimated to be for a tenth of the cost and up to six times faster: with benefits of using, under license, the core market data service platform, tools, schemas, protocols and template agreements (rather than developing these new).
The 2025 project has demonstrated the attractiveness to the European cycling industry of accurate retail sales data. Securing ‘expressions-of-interest’ in becoming an MDSi subscriber from over 30 businesses in Germany during the project, has given vital momentum to the product’s full launch in the German market in Q1 of 2026.
Our project’s AI-powered ‘decision-tools’, developed with ENU Business School, have proved that cycle industry inventory data can be gathered, cleaned and made useful.
Using traditional statistical, machine and deep-learning models the team has achieved accurate demand forecasts, keeping the error rate for the full market below 10%. This precision surpasses industry benchmarks for fast-moving consumer markets, creating a competitive advantage for MDSI.
Project partner ZIV set-up ‘Veloconnect 1.6 B2X’ to transfer data easily from EPOS systems to MDSi. As Veloconnect is the most used data transmission standard in Europe’s cycle industry, this is an asset when extending MDSi to further European countries.
