Lokad news - Integrated business forecasting

The video produced by Kirix about Lokad was a great source of inspiration for us. We realized that videos were a pretty efficient way to communicate on software. Thus, we decided to produce a couple of video tutorials for Lokad.

Our first tutorial is about Lokad Safety Stock Calculator. Check out how to start optimizing your inventory with Lokad within minutes.

In this video, you will learn how get started with Lokad Safety Stock Calculator, how to import your sales data and how to generate your first report. We will also explain how the report works and what are the key figures to look at.

You can also download the Windows Media Player file of the video. Special thanks to Rex Teodosio for helping us producing this video.

Thanks to the contribution of Toby Champion, we have updated our forecasting tutorial for PHP5. Indeed, PHP5 now natively supports SOAP web services (the standard used by Lokad). The old PHP4 tutorial based on NuSoap remains available.

Lokad delivers an advance forecasting technology, but for those who may just needing simple stuff, we have published a short guide about forecasting in Excel.

It is meant to be as simple as possible, and show what can be done with Excel in terms of forecasting - using linear regression or exponential fitting, through trendlines or the excel analysis toolpack (ATP).

It should allow small businesses, retailers or manufacturers, to easily perform a basic forecast of sales and demand.

It also gives useful advices about how to optimally use Excel, use comments and name your files and worksheets.

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.

Lokad can be accessed programmatically through our web services. We are already providing tutorials for quite a few languages, namely C#, Java, PHP and C++.

But we were not providing any Python tutorials so far, although there are several promising ERP implemented in Python. If you're not convinced, have a look at TinyERP and ERP5.

Thanks to Maxim Krikun, we have now a complete Python tutorial that explains how to use our Forecasting Web Services. As usual, the source code has been released as open source on SourceForge.

We have just updated the Lokad website. The new version comes with an extensive tutorial to work with our Web Services in C#. Through this tutorial, you will learn how to perform programmatically the basic operations associated to your Lokad account (time-series and forecasts management). In case .Net/C# is not your preferred platform, don't worry. We have already planned to translate this tutorial for Java and PHP.  

Btw, Happy New Year 2007

 

I have almost finished to write the Lokad User Guide. In case you might be interested, I have pasted below the table of content of this guide. Stay tuned for the release. Meantime you can contact us directly, we will do our best to answer your questions.

Lokad, User guide

• Preface
  • Who should read this guide?
  • What is the content of this guide?
• Table of contents
• Time-series forecasting applied to business
  • What is a time-series?
  • Profitability through time-series forecasting
• The Lokad services
  • Big picture
  • Time-series data
  • Forecasting tasks
  • Forecasted time-series retrieval
  • Lokad business network

 Update: New documents mentioned below have been released 2006-12-09.

We know that documentation is still a weak point of Lokad, but we are already working on it. We will soon release a series of short documents

• In a nutshell: Forecast, Why and How?
• Top 10 benefits of Lokad
• Lokad vs. the Competition
  

Plus, we are also working on extensive (and printable) guides for Lokad. Stay tuned. Meantime the email support will do its best to answer all your questions.