Forecasting for Business - Blog

Lately, a few users have been asking how does Lokad handle an exceptional sales that won't be happening again anytime soon? This issue is usually known as outliers management: how to deal with data points that are completely off compared to the other points.

Lokad is only looking at historical data, and since we don't know that the exceptional sales aren't going to happen again (expert knowledge), this event is going to be interpreted as "real" sales, leading to potentially over-estimated sales forecasts. This situation is a typical case of demand forecasts vs. sales forecasts.

At this point, the natural solution would be to give the user the possibility to adjust the historical data to truly reflects the demand. We are currently working on a solution dedicated to safety stock calculations that would handle this sort of situations. Stay tuned.