Lokad news - Integrated business forecasting

The term forecasting software is quite ambiguous because it can refer to very different things. This post is a modest attempt to clarify the situation.

Deterministic simulation software

A common type of ''forecasting'' software is the simulation software. As input, the software takes a set of rules, of facts, of constraints and this information is used to run a deterministic simulation. The results of the simulation constitute the ''forecasts'. The simulation is said to be deterministic if the same input data produces exactly the output results. In such simulation, there is no ''uncertainty'' and no ''randomness''.

Many staff scheduling software are simulation forecasting software: a schedule must be made for each employee, each schedule must respect many constraints and the resulting schedule combination must also respect constraints).

Expert insights aggregation software

Contrary to the simulation situation where all parameters are ''under control'', there are many business situations that depend on events that occur with a proportion of chance / randomness. A typical way of handling the business uncertainty consists in relying on people's expertise to figure out what will happen next. Many software are designed to aggregate the insights delivered by the ''experts'' of the company to deliver a global forecast.

Many CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software provide expert aggregation forecasting. Each vendor (the experts) provide a probability of success for his own upcoming deals. The CRM software computes the global upcoming sales figures by summing all the vendor's forecasts.

Statistical forecasting software

Beside the company experts, another very valuable source of information to predict the future is the historical data of the company. Statistical methods can be used to produce forecasts automatically based on the historical data. Statistical forecasting software rely on those mathematical methods to produce their forecasts.

Most supply chain optimization software relies on statistical methods to forecast the inputs/outputs of products. Statistical methods call also be used to anticipate customer demand (ex: future call volumes for a call center) and adjust staffing capacity accordingly.

The Lokad Case

Lokad is a statistical forecasting software. As discussed here above, Lokad relies on historical data and not on any expert insights. In addition, Lokad is mostly an hosted application. The forecasts are computed directly on the Lokad.com servers and not on the customer local machine. This approach leads to a greater forecasting accuracy.

We are saying that Lokad is ''mostly'' hosted because we provide many integration add-ons that requires to be installed on the customer local machine to enable the integration of Lokad within existing IT systems.

We are very proud to annouce that Lokad has been listed in the Business Intelligence Solutions section of the Microsoft Office Marketplace. Lokad indeed supports Microsoft Office Accouting through Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting.
 

Lokad has also be recently listed in the community projects of OpenBravo. Again, it's through Lokad Desktop that we provide support for OpenBravo.

We are very proud to announce that Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting now supports Paypal starting from version 1.1.3. Lokad Desktop retrieves all your sales history from your Paypal account and generates sales forecasts reports.

The version 1.1.3 also includes a few user interface improvements. In particular, more feedback gets displayed when background tasks are running. Plus a minor bugfix concerning the button state at application startup. 

With the support of Paypal, Lokad is now able to deliver sales forecasts to online retailers that are using eCommerce packages still unsupported by Lokad. If you are using another payment provider and you would like Lokad to support this payment provider as well, do not hesitate to give us some community feedback.

We have just released the version 2.0.4 of Lokad osCommerce Sales Forecasting. This release includes a bugfix concerning the time-serie aggregation (this bug was already reported in the SF.NET bug tracker) and also minor correction relative to the migration of the Lokad Web Application toward its own subdomain app.lokad.com.

We suggest to upgrade to the last version. If you are already using a version 2.0+ of Lokad osCommerce, you just need to overwrite the old PHP scripts with the ones.

 

It's the Triple1 version for Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting with the release today of the version 1.1.1.

Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting comes now with a native support for

• CubeCart under MySQL
• Apache OfBiz under PostgreSQL and Oracle
• Openbravo under PostgreSQL and Oracle
  
• TinyERP under PostgreSQL
  
• VirtueMart under MySQL
  

Bonus: OpenTaps and Neogia gets supported natively through the OfBiz support

This is our biggest 3rd party application support extension since the very first 1.0 release. Special thanks to Mike Jakowetz who did heavily contribute to this release.

We have just released Lokad osCommerce Sales Forecasting v2.0.3. This release comes with a few bug fixes, in particular, the sales aggregation was wrong under some circonstances. We suggest to upgrade to the version 2.0.3.

UPGRADING: For those who have already installed a previous version, you just need to overwrite the previous Lokad PHP scripts with the new ones and then make a "Clear Lokad Account" first for the reporting panel.