Lokad news - Integrated business forecasting

Our Safety Stock Calculator v1.8 has been released. This version supports OpenERP (previously named TinyERP). This version also comes a with slightly more tolerant behavior when importing data from Excel spreadsheets.

Lokad Safety Stock Calculator v1.6 has been released. This version includes a couple of important bugfixes. In particular, this version should be more reliable on large datasets. We have improved the handling of network timeouts. An issue has also been fixed with reorder points that were incorrectly set to zero in specific situations.

Concerning the improvements, the version 1.6 automatically saves the report at the start and at the end of the full refresh process. Thus, if Windows gets restarted (say because of an automated security update), the newly refreshed report does not get lost in the process.

We have also fixed a bug in the Check for Updates operation. The auto-update operation was failing if the MSI file had been renamed before launching the installation. If the auto-update fails, then just uninstall and reinstall.

Forecasting is important for many industries, but it is critical for the call center industry. Indeed. too much staff and the expenses get out of control. Too few staff and your customers are driven nuts by the long waiting queues.

Call Center Calculator (L3C) is a windows reporting application targeting call center managers to help them optimizing their call centers. The two main features of L3C are call volume forecasts (through Lokad) and staff level optimization (through Erlang C).

In this V1, L3C does not natively support yet many 3^rd party applications for call activity logs retrieval. Yet, we provide an Excel import format (because many call center applications support exporting data toward Excel) and a dedicated SQL query editor if you want to directly import data from a database.

The V1 does not handle events (typically marketing events), yet it is possible to manually tweak the staff level suggestions. This feature will be considered for later versions.

Don't hesitate to tell us what you think, what would be the most needed features and/or the most important 3^rd party applications that we need to support. We do our best to address all customer requests.

Both ADempiere and Compiere are now supported by our Safety Stock Calculator v1.4. Special thanks to the folks of Crimzone for making this possible.

Since this is the second release in less than a week, we have added a Check for Updates feature to LSSC. Now, upgrading the application should not require more efforts than a few clicks.

In this v1.4 release, we have also added a dedicated connector for QuickBooks Canada Multicurrency, which does not behave like the regular US editions of QuickBooks.

Lokad Safety Stock Calculator v1.3 has been released. This new version fixes many subtle, yet annoying, defects of the previous versions.

Those fixes are based on questions sent to the Lokad support. Following the two ways fix approach, we do our best, first to address customer questions, and second the fix the underlying issues which caused questions to be raised in the first place.

Among the various improvements, it is now possible to

• to cancel an operation in progress.
• to minimize the application to the system tray when waiting for the forecasts.
• to clear a report (i.e. erasing all existing data while keeping the settings).
• to import data from Excel (check the tutorial).
• to browse for the right file when the connection string is a file path.

Plus, we have improved a couple of error messages and behaviors to make them less obscure to those who did not happen to actually design the application.

Lokad Safety Stock Calculator v1.0 has been released. Beside having a new product icon (compared to the beta), this release supports many 3rd party applications, including JFire, Sage, Magento, X-Cart, PrestaShop, ViArt, WebERP that were previously unsupported. If your favorite application is still missing from the list, just contact us.

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.