Lokad news - Integrated business forecasting

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.

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.

We have just released Lokad Excel Sales Forecasting 1.2 which includes a couple of bug fixes. This addin for Excel can retrieve data from more than 20 third-party applications, and among the various fixes, we have corrected the behavior of the "Excel provider" - the component used to retrieve sales data directly from an Excel spreadsheet.

We have just released the version 1.1 of Lokad Excel Sales Forecasting addin. This release comes with many bugfixes over the initial release. No new features have been added.

Supporting all Excel versions starting from Excel 2000 up to Excel 2007 proved to be a much more complicated task than we initially suspected. Excel versions are varying from one to another in many subtle ways, I apologize for the issues that some of you have been encountering with the initial release. We hope things will go more smoothly with this release.

As detailed in the changelog file:

• Refactored the addin shim to use custom interop.
• Bug fix for the UDF registration under Excel 2007.
• Added a sample spreadsheet in Excel 2007 format.
• Bug fix for incorrect separator handling of int. Excel versions.
• Bug fix for the Lokad command bar that was loaded multiple times.
• Improving behavior when UDF can't be parsed.
• Bug fix for the providers required an option.
• Removing deprecated overload from ForecastSales.
• Improving behavior when ForecastSales args are incorrect.
• Fixing a bug that was blocking Excel 2000 users.

Never hesitate to contact the support if you encounter any issue with the Lokad products.

In retail, the ultimate goal of sales forecasting is usually to calculate optimal safety stocks. Unfortunately, most online resources do give much detail about the explicit algorithms that should be used for safety stocks.

In order to facilitate the task for customers and partners (and competitors :-), I have just published an extensive guide Calculate safety stocks with sales forecasting. The guide is illustrated with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

The intent of this guide is to be a valuable piece of information for practitioners. I have pushed some efforts in order to make it independent from the Lokad forecasting technology (thus, you can grab your favorite forecasting tool, and re-use the formulas as such).

I am very proud to announce that Lokad Excel Sales Forecasting v1.0 has been released. The add-in for Microsoft Excel comes as a significant enhancement of Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting. Special thanks to Sergey Fassonov that has been the lead developer for this release.

Let me first explain why the Excel Sales Forecasting was needed. Desktop Sales Forecasting is a nice stand-alone application but it is suffering many limitations:

• there is no built-in no data persistence: if you close the application after retrieving your forecasts, the data is lost. One can argue that it was possible to copy-and-paste into Microsoft Excel in order to store the data; but then why not do everything from Excel directly? This is the approach taken in Lokad Excel.
• the application was essentially limited to a single report. Indeed, in order to get a new the report (like changing from monthly to weekly forecast), it is necessary to change the Lokad Desktop settings. With Lokad Excel is become possible to create (and store) as many sales reports as you wish directly into your spreadsheets.
• there is no support for custom sales data. Being an open-source application, it's still possible to directly extend Lokad Desktop; but this approach requires some C# coding skills and it's usually overkill. With Lokad Excel, it is now possible to load sales data directly from an Excel spreadsheet (in addition to all the supported applications).

As a nice bonus, through Excel Sales Forecasting, it is now possible to leverage our forecasting technology with all the capabilities of Excel. More to come on the subject, stay tuned ...