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.

What do reCAPTCHA, Akismet and Lokad have in common?

Well, they are all application blocks leveraging their respective communities to better fulfill their goals.

At Lokad, we believe (like many others actually) that the future of enterprise software, such as ERP or CRM, will rely on Service-oriented Architecture (SOA is short) where each component of the system is largely decoupled from the other components, and eventually provided by independent software vendors.

Considering our initial question, let's note that

• Akismet collects blog comments from a crowd of blogs in order to better filter out the blog spam.
• reCAPTCHA (*) provides an anti-botnet filtering system to distinguish real human users from machines on the web.
• Lokad collects demand data from a crowd of companies in order to improve the overall forecast accuracy.

A modular approach gives much more flexibility to the enterprise to design an IT system that really fit its needs (rather than the other way around). Modularity also reduces the risks of being dragged down because one piece of system is completely obsolete due to lack of investment of one particular software vendor.

Yet another type of benefits brought by specialized actors (think Akismet for blog spam filtering) is that it suddenly becomes possible to leverage the community to deliver smarter behaviors: Akismet is using the information obtained on each blog to improve its spam filtering on all the other blogs.

Today, it seems like that the first wave of crowd-enabled enterprise components was mostly oriented toward security tasks. The raise of security standards such as OpenId are likely to push even further this componentization of security blocks within enterprise software.

Yet, we believe that the second wave of crowd-enabled components will be oriented toward business analytics, ranging from intellectual property management, customer behavior analysis to operations research. Obviously, we want Lokad to be a leading player in this second wave. :-)

(*) Due to a botnet attack on our forums last week, we have upgraded the forum captcha toward reCAPTCHA. The amount of non-human registrations has dropped from hundreds per day to zero.

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.

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 released Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting v1.3. This version comes many improvements including a new provider for Excel. This means that that you can now load data from an Excel spreadsheet into the Lokad Desktop application.

You can also check the complete change history.

We have started to work on Lokad Call Center Calculator (L3C). This application will be the successor of Lokad Desktop Workload Forecasting. Yet, L3C will be completely dedicated to the call center industry.

Among the key features that we are pushing forward for the first release:

• Retrieve historical data, such as call volumes and staff levels from your call center application.
• Visualize your data with filters such as day of the week (useful when it comes to compare the forecasts with comparable data over the last few weeks).
• Adjust call center queue settings such as expected service level or speed of answer, average call duration and wrap-up time.
• Convert incoming call volumes into staffing level suggestions with an embedded variant of the Erlang C formula.
• Edit staffing levels, if staffing suggestions need to be corrected.
• Export planned call volumes and staffing levels toward 3rd party applications.

We are already considering a native support for a couple of 3rd party applications such as Vicidial, Viev, QueueMetrics ...

Like the other Lokad products, L3C will be released as open-source. Do not hesitate to make your own feature requests.

Due to popular demand, we have started to work on Lokad Safety Stock Calculator an analytics application that will be dedicated to inventory optimization.

Soon after the initial release of Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting, it did become clear that both retailers and manufacturers were needing a deeper analysis than just sales forecasts. In particular, safety stocks that optimize the desired levels of service were among the most frequently requested feature.

Our initial specification for the "safety stocks" application includes a report that displays, for every product (or every SKU if there are multiple storage locations),

• Past sales (grabbed from a 3rd party software).
• Future sales (forecasted by Lokad).
• Stock level (grabbed from a 3rd party software).
• Stock coverage (computed), the time to reach the stock out if no reorder is made.
• Supplier (manually entered), just to be able to sort the products against their respective suppliers.
• Lead time (manually entered).
• Service factor (manually entered), the desired probably to get a stock-out.
• Reorder point (computed), the suggested amount of inventory that should trigger a reorder.
• Delta stock (computed as stock at hand minus reorder point), it tells you how much over-stock you have.

Like we did already, this application will be released as open source under SourceForge. If you think we should include more features, do not hesitate to contact us or to directly submit a feature request.

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.

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.