Partners » Software Editors

Power your applications with forecasting

Enhancing your software solution by providing operational business forecasts is a straightforward way to create a great amount of added value for your customers. As a software editor, you can turn this "forecasting" value into revenue and competition differentiation.

Lokad is already working with small and large software companies, both in open and closed source worlds. Yet, we are still actively looking for partners (contact us), especially with companies delivering products such as

• ERP
• accounting
• CRM
• eCommerce
• payment provider
• staff management
• call center management

Your customers need forecasts

As soon as a replenishment order is made or an employee schedule is devised, an implicit demand forecast is made. Although, the process is not always formalized, operational forecasts are unavoidable in most industries such as retail, manufacturing, logistics, customer services...


Companies that implement accurate forecasting processes realize important benefits such as:

• Knowing when and how much to buy.
• Committing the resources at the right time to meet the customer demand.
• Better planning for production and capacity.
• Enhanced cash flow.
• Reducing the working capital.

Forecasts are also critical if the company is trying to obtain financing from investors or other lending institutions, they are used to determine the value of a business above the value of its current assets.

Yet, due to the drawbacks of traditional forecasting approaches, forecasting is often is discarded by small or medium companies as too complicated and too expensive to be implemented.

We believe that Lokad is bringing three answers to this situation.

Simplicity. Lokad requires zero statistical knowledge, neither from the partnering software editor, nor from the end users. Forecasts can be obtained in a single click.

Accuracy. Lokad leverages large amount of input data, and not only the sole data of a particular customer, to increase the accuracy of the delivered forecasts.

Reliability. Forecasts are continuously monitored and readjusted. Lokad delivers fully automated industrial strength services.

Forecasting is a source of revenue

Adding valuable new features is the key to establishing recurrent revenues with your existing customer base. Forecasting saves a lot of money on the customer side, and those benefits can be used to justify an application upgrade.

But for your software product, adding a forecasting feature also means that you can either increase the price of your application or maintain its price in a very competitive environment. Maintenance releases aren't sufficient to achieve this.

Finally software is a very competitive area. With Lokad, you can stay ahead of the competition by giving to your products a distinctive edge. Most business applications do not include any forecasting technology because those technologies used to be too complex to be implemented at a reasonable cost. But integrating Lokad is straightforward and painless.

For small customers, Lokad is usually free. Indeed, our partner plan includes a rebate of 20 USD / month which usually brings the cost of the Lokad subscription to zero for small customers. For example, Lokad can be free for a retailer who needs 50 monthly forecasting tasks for its top selling products or for a call center who needs 1 hourly forecasting task for its total incoming call volumes.

For medium or large customers, Lokad charges a monthly subscription. Yet, the working capital savings and the cash flow enhancements brought by forecasting lead to immediate return on investment. Also, in order to leverage forecasts to their full potential, IT services and consulting companies are often needed. With Lokad, you can strengthen your own services or your partner network through a new spectrum of missions.

Partnering with Lokad

We are very flexible about the way Lokad gets integrated. For example, a "quick" solution consists in creating an add-on for your application. Also, if your application is SaaS then Lokad can easily be integrated as a white label component.

If you intend to integrate our forecasting technology, we can provide

• technical assistance during the implementation. Typically, a developer will be assigned to your case and will be available to help if difficulties are encountered.
• marketing assistance (if you wish to) to help you to communicate on your new forecasting capabilities with your customers.

Naturally, we also reference and advertise our partners both on www.lokad.com and blog.lokad.com.

If you think that your application can generate a significant amount of subscription revenue for Lokad, then we are open to discuss some revenue sharing options. We suggest to contact us for more details.

Implementing the integration

Through our Forecasting API, the Lokad forecasting technology can be easily integrated integrated into 3rd party applications (check our current Partner Network).

If your business application is relying on a common RDBMS, then only a couple of hours of development time are required to extend Lokad Excel Sales Forecasting to support your application (basically 3 simple SQL queries need to be customized).

Usually, a native integration can be achieved within a few weeks by a single developer (this sample case study is outlining the process). Lokad has already released a significant amount of code as open source under a liberal license (BSD) compatible with closed source software. This code can be freely reused to facilitate the integration.