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Lokad staff posts here tips, news and tutorial either related to Lokad or related to business forecasting in general.

Check our archives for a selection of posts to help your business with insights about forecasting.


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Entries in opensource (3)

Monday
Jul202009

Safety Stock and Call Center Calcs v2.3 released

DateMonday, July 20, 2009 at 11:59AM

Summer is getting hot these days, so are things within Lokad. We are happy to announce the availability of two new releases:

The last release wave was focusing on reliability and performance through the migration toward our Forecasting SDK. Yet over the last few months we realized that many glitches were dragging people down from time to time, and that a couple of handy features were missing.

Thus for the present release, we have been focusing on ease of use, adding polish virtually everywhere in the apps, from the installer up to report edition.

Safety Stock Calculator 2.3 features:

  • support for adding contextual information to events (improves quality of the forecasts);
  • support for horizontal Excel layout and for importing from native XLSX files (Excel 2007 format);
  • ability to mass-update selected columns and cells with custom value;
  • data uploads to Lokad servers should be faster on machines with .NET 3.5;
  • numerous UI improvements and minor fixes;
  • improvements in extensibility model that makes it easier for developers to add new custom adapters and share them;
  • improved update and deployment system allowing faster delivery of new features and fixes.

The app can be installed by launching this MSI package. No need to uninstall the previous version.

Call Center Calculator 2.3 features:

  • support for adding contextual information to events (improves quality of the forecasts);
  • support for importing from native XLSX files;
  • data uploads to Lokad servers should be faster on machines with .NET 3.5;
  • improvements in extensibility model that makes it easier for developers to add new custom adapters and share them;
  • numerous UI improvements and minor fixes;
  • improved update and deployment system allowing faster delivery of new features and fixes to you.

The app could be installed by launching this MSI package. Again, no need to uninstall the previous version.

Yet, v2.3 isn't our final word. Behind the scene, our research team (as always) keeps working hard on developing and evolving business intelligence powering our forecasting services.

Also, we have plenty of ideas to further improves those apps. Don't hesitate to drop your own requests into the feature list.

AuthorJoannes Vermorel | CommentPost a Comment |
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Wednesday
Jun102009

Forecasting in the clouds and Lokad.Cloud

DateWednesday, June 10, 2009 at 04:18PM

Cloud computing will be the no1 buzzword in software industry in 2009. Among forums, blogs, even traditional news papers, cloud computing is the new rage; and we, at Lokad, are no exception.

Yet, for us, cloud computing is not a buzzword, it's a very real technology addressing a very critical aspect of our technology: scalability.

In short, delivering forecasts is a rather bumpy process: for one week, we wait, and then, suddenly, a customer sends us a (very) large amount and (rightfully) expects forecasts to be delivered within 1h.

Traditional computing infrastructures do not deal efficiently with those sorts of needs: servers are rented for at least one month with strong pricing incentive toward longer engagements. For Lokad, traditional server hosting means that our processing power is vastly underused; yet during peaks, there is never enough processing power available.

Thus, we have started migrating toward the cloud, and more specifically toward Windows Azure (special thanks to Steve Marx and Yi-Lun Luo from Microsoft for their assistance to get us started with Azure).

For those who rely on us, cloud computing means that we will be able to serve you better through:

  • unrivaled and unlimited scalability: no matter how large your data, we will address your needs, on demand, real time.
  • better forecasts through more complex statistical models that are presently too expensive CPU-wise to be put in production.

Lokad.Cloud big picture

Although, cloud computing is still a rough field lacking many commodities usually taken for granted by developers when dealing with non-cloud apps. This is why we have started a new open source project named Lokad.Cloud that provides a .NET framework to speedup the development of back-office apps built on top of Windows Azure. We expect an alpha release in July. Stay tuned.

AuthorJoannes Vermorel | CommentPost a Comment |
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Tuesday
Mar172009

Sales forecasting for Microsoft Excel 2007

DateTuesday, March 17, 2009 at 12:10PM

Microsoft Excel is a de-facto standard for many industries; and many people here have been asking for a better support of Excel for a long time. In our initial attempt at supporting Microsoft Excel, we have been trying to support all versions back to Excel 2000, but the result was not that great, and our add-in was not working properly on many configurations.

This time, we have put a strong focus on the latest version of Excel, and we are proud to announce the release of Lokad Sales Forecasting for Microsoft Excel.

This Add-in natively integrates into Microsoft Excel 2007 instantly enhancing it with the powerful forecasting capabilities provided by Lokad services.

This release comes with better User Interface and improved synchronization heuristics.

Just configure the connection, define forecasting tasks and hit Refresh to deliver results right into your Excel Workbook. Forecasting has never been so easy!

You can check out more screenshots or dive right into the tutorial. Lokad Support will be glad to answer any questions and receive any feedback.

AuthorJoannes Vermorel | CommentPost a Comment |
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