Lokad news - Integrated business forecasting

The first beta of Lokad Safety Stock Calculator has 3 buttons, namely Retrieve, Upload and Download as you can see in the screenshot below.

In order to do a complete refresh of the report, the user has to go through 4 successive operations:

• Click Retrieve.
• Click Upload.
• Wait! Don't forget, it's an important step.
• Click Download.

Somehow this design is really cumbersome, because those 4 operations are just mundane tasks aiming for a unique purpose: getting the latest version of the report.

Thus, we have decided to upgrade the application, by actually removing two buttons. Here is the latest screenshot of the application.

With this design, the user just has to click once on Refresh and LSSC will perform the 4 operations mentioned here above on its own (with a wait time set to 1h, which should be fine for most users).

Then, since all the user wants is an up-to-date report, the question becomes:
Can't we get rid of this last button? Well, sort of.

It seems difficult to actually get rid of this Refresh button, yet, what we can do is to schedule background refresh operations. Instead of getting rid of the Refresh button, we would get rid of the need to actually click it once an auto-refresh schedule has been setup.

Auto-refresh is part of our mid-term plans, stay tuned.

We have just added a Developer's section. Lokad has been designed to be easily integrated into any 3rd party application right from the start. Yet, the information targeting developers was somehow spread into many different sections of our website. Adding a Developers section was the obvious solution to this problem.

We have just released the first beta of Lokad Safety Stock Calculator (LSSC). This application is best suited for retailers and manufacturers who need to optimize their inventory levels. As announced previously, LSSC provides report points optimization and stock coverage analysis.

Compared to Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting, LSSC comes as significant upgrade

• True business-oriented report that includes stocks on hand, suppliers, lead times, service levels ... in addition to the raw sales forecasts.
• Incremental inventory data retrieval and incremental sales data upload toward Lokad. Performances get greatly improved for recurrent usage.
• Build-in customization framework. LSSC comes bundled with LSSC Editor, a GUI tool that let you design custom inventory connectors for LSSC.

As LSSC gets out of beta, Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting will be put in maintenance mode, since this application brings no additional benefits compared to LSSC.

A couple days ago, Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting 1.3 was released, and today, it's the turn of Lokad Excel Sales Forecasting 1.3. This release includes a couple of bugfixes and a major performance improvement when handling very large Excel spreadsheets with thousands of lines.

Do not hesitate to check out the change logs.

In all the Lokad applications, both add-ons and the web application itself, there is a mysterious forecasting task setting named the period start.

Mea culpa. Choosing this name was really unfortunate and lead to many incomprehension.

Thus, I have decided to rename this parameter the period reference. It's default value is 2001-01-01 (i.e. Monday, January 1st, 2001), and unless you know why you need to change this value, I would strongly suggest you did not.

Let's start with a practical example. Let's assume that, as a retailer, you need monthly sales forecasts in order to make your monthly sales replenishment orders. Yet, your business months are starting the 15th of each month. All your suppliers are expecting your orders to be passed the 15th, and for years, all your monthly sales analysis have been starting the 15th.

In such a situation, it would be a real pain if Lokad was arbitrarily deciding that a month had to be starting the 1st. In order to avoid such a pitfall, Lokad provides an additional setting for the forecasting task definition that lets you adjust when you want the period to start: it's the period reference.

If you want your monthly forecasts to start the 15th of each month, then you can use 2001-01-15 as your period reference (or 1999-02-15 or 2017-11-15, the result would be the same). This date is used as a reference to infer all the other period's starting dates.

Further examples:

• If the period reference is set to 2001-01-15 for a yearly forecast, then all years start January 15h (instead of January 1st).
• If the period reference is set to 2001-01-15 for a weekly, then all weeks start on Tuesdays (because 2001-01-15 was a Tuesday).

In summary: The period reference, previously named "period start", is a date (past or future, it does not matter) used by Lokad to adjust the period boundaries both for historical data aggregation but also for the forecasts themselves. In particular, it has nothing to do with the starting date of the forecasts.

We have just released Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting v1.3. This version comes many improvements including a new provider for Excel. This means that that you can now load data from an Excel spreadsheet into the Lokad Desktop application.

You can also check the complete change history.

Although the Lokad services themselves are closed source, all the integration components have been released as open source. The two upcoming products Lokad Safety Stock Calculator and Lokad Call Center Calculator are also developed as open source products.

For the Lokad customers, key benefits of open source components are

• no spyware, no badware. We don't ask you to trust us, you go and check the code yourself. We do our best to maintain a documented code, nothing gets buried in the dark.
• greater control on your IT infrastructure. Having the source code means that you can't be locked in (through proprietary file formats that could not be migrated for ex.).

Yet, as Jeff Atwood is pointing out, open source isn't only about disclosing the source code. His definition of open source involve further requirements:

• An OSI approved license. Lokad is using the (new) BSD license that allows code reuse into both closed and open source applications.
• The project must use a commonly available method of public source control. Lokad is relying on the Subversion hosting of SourceForge.NET. Thus, Lokad can't just take the code offline on its own.
• The project must provide public evidence that it accepts and encourages code contributions from the outside world. Well, you can check the Ohloh page of Lokad to have a look to see how many people are involved in those projects.

Also, on a more technical side, we have also setup a public build server. Our continuous integration builds include unit testing, automated code guidelines validation, and documentation generation. Check it out!

We have started to work on Lokad Call Center Calculator (L3C). This application will be the successor of Lokad Desktop Workload Forecasting. Yet, L3C will be completely dedicated to the call center industry.

Among the key features that we are pushing forward for the first release:

• Retrieve historical data, such as call volumes and staff levels from your call center application.
• Visualize your data with filters such as day of the week (useful when it comes to compare the forecasts with comparable data over the last few weeks).
• Adjust call center queue settings such as expected service level or speed of answer, average call duration and wrap-up time.
• Convert incoming call volumes into staffing level suggestions with an embedded variant of the Erlang C formula.
• Edit staffing levels, if staffing suggestions need to be corrected.
• Export planned call volumes and staffing levels toward 3rd party applications.

We are already considering a native support for a couple of 3rd party applications such as Vicidial, Viev, QueueMetrics ...

Like the other Lokad products, L3C will be released as open-source. Do not hesitate to make your own feature requests.

The Lokad activity is growing and it feels hard to keep up with the demand. Thus, I have decided to add a careers section to the Lokad website.

We are proud to achieve a 12/12 on the Joel Test, and our goal is to make Lokad a really nice place to work. Open positions include

• Software developer
• Intern in software development
• Intern in marketing
• Intern or PhD with a mathematics or statistics background

For development works, we are looking for highly talented developers that are willing to take important responsibilities right from the start. We are way too small to afford having people doing less than useful work.

Considering that Lokad is also involving a lot of hard-core mathematical aspects, we are also willing to consider brilliant junior mathematicians with little or no programming experience. We will provide the necessary training to let you turn your mathematical ideas into industrial-strength applications.

Lokad offers the possibility to do a PhD in Computer Science within the company after an internship. Such PhDs get co-directed by Lokad and French university.

We are proud to announce that Lokad is now officially listed by Microsoft (in French) as part of their IDEES program. The IDEES program is rewarding the 25 (most) innovative French startups every year. You can also visit the US edition of the Microsoft Startup Zone.

Also, we are also proud to mention that Lokad has been selected by ScrewTurn - the open source ASP.NET wiki used for www.lokad.com - as the first reference for their category Who is using ScrewTurn? Granted, the Lokad technology has little to do with this second selection. :-)