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.

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.

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.

Data analytics is an ubiquitous challenge. Whenever there is business, there are data - and wherever data are, Kirix Strata is going to bring them to you.

But Kirix Strata can do much more than that. At Lokad, we have been quite impressed by the amount things that were easy to achieve with Kirix Strata even when the product was still in beta. Now that Kirix Strata is completely ready for production, it's even better.

Ever felt the need to organize your business data for strategic thinking? but never done it because it was just too complicated. If so, Kirix is definitively a solution for you.

Yet, one minor feature was lacking from Kirix Strata though: forecasting. We are very proud to announce that Lokad has become the first Strata extension that takes advantage of Strata’s web scripting capabilities in order to bring advanced forecasting to this great product.

The Kirix team has just released an excellent video that demonstrates how Strata/Lokad works. Enjoy the show!

(And here’s an embeddable YouTube version)

Since the launch of the Developer's corner, I have noticed that Lokad was lacking some high level documentation that would rather address Why? questions as opposed addressing How to? questions.

Thus, I have summarized in the newly published Programmer's guide for the Time Series API a couple of answers to the questions that get frequently asked by our partners. If anything is missing, just ask.

We are proud to announce that Lokad is now officially listed by Microsoft (in French) as part of their IDEES program. The IDEES program is rewarding the 25 (most) innovative French startups every year. You can also visit the US edition of the Microsoft Startup Zone.

Also, we are also proud to mention that Lokad has been selected by ScrewTurn - the open source ASP.NET wiki used for www.lokad.com - as the first reference for their category Who is using ScrewTurn? Granted, the Lokad technology has little to do with this second selection. :-)

Lokad has been designed to be integrated into 3rd party applications. Our ambition is not to become the next killer inventory or staff management application, but to stick to what we do best: statistical forecasting.

Thus, I have just published a case study Forecasting for scheduling software that involves a fictitious company named Scheduloo delivering a staff scheduling software in ASP.

Disclaimer: All characters depicted herein are fictional characters, and any similarities to actual persons and/or companies are purely coincidental.

In summary, the case study details how (and why) Lokad could be integrated as a forecasting component in a staff scheduling application in order to provide a staff optimization feature.

The case study has been kept simple and tractable, A priori, it should not contain any rocket science ideas. Yet, more ambitious approaches could also be considered.

For example, following the idea of the evidence-based scheduling that ships with Fogbuzz, the mapping sales2staff (i.e. converting turnover into staff level) could be inferred from the historical data as opposed to be made explicit by the staff manager.

Then, many businesses (such as retail) are very dependent from the weather. Lokad, although being accurate for business forecasts, will only perform poorly on weather forecasts. Thus, there is a nice mash-up to be made that would combine the Lokad technology with classical weather forecasts as provided by the National Weather Service for example.

We are proud to announce that Paypal has listed Lokad in their solution directory. Indeed, Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting (and the setup instructions that are specific to Paypal) has been supporting Paypal since the version 1.1.3.

Because no matter how many Web 2.0 widgets you have in your eCommerce front-end, too much inventory is wasted money.

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.