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User guide for LSSC

This guide will help you to understand the features provided by Lokad Safety Stock Calculator (LSSC).

This application targets retailers and manufacturers who need to optimize their inventory levels and their replenishment orders.

Big picture

LSSC features inventory optimization reports. In order to produce the reports, LSSC depends on two other applications:

• a business database where the inventory data is retrieved from. LSSC supports natively many 3^rd party applications. Plus, we provide LSSC Editor (part of the LSSC package) that let you easily design connectors for custom or unsupported applications.
• the Lokad forecasting services that forecast the demand. The demand data is first uploaded to Lokad (data being obfuscated beforehand), and the demand forecasts are downloaded from Lokad.

Thanks to Lokad, LSSC computes, in a completely automated manner, stock covers and optimized reorder points.

LSSC is an open-source application (so the application itself is free), but it relies on a Lokad subscription plan to enable the forecast retrieval.

Setting up a report

Start LSSC and click on File » New. The report setup wizard appears. This wizard will guide you while defining your report settings.

Lokad settings

The first wizard panel is named Lokad account settings. You need to enter the same login and password that you are using to access your Lokad account.

If you intend to have several inventory reports (ex: if you are managing the inventories of several companies), then you should specify a different Series prefix for each report. This prefix is used to avoid name collision within your Lokad account.

Unless you are developer hacking into LSSC, we suggest you do not change the WS URL or the task name.

Inventory Report Properties

The second wizard panel is named Inventory Report Properties. This panel let you define the type of report that you want.

The Period defines the level of aggregation used in the report (ex: day, week, month). We suggest to use the period that is the most practical to address your business requirements.

The Past periods indicates how many periods of past demand (usually sales) will be displayed in the report. Note that this setting has no impact on the forecasts.

The Future periods indicates how many periods of future demand will be forecasted. We suggest that you take an number of periods that is twice as large as your typical lead time. Indeed, if the lower of future periods, the faster the forecast retrieval will be. Yet, if future periods is too low (in particular, lower than the lead time), the accuracy of the suggested reorder point will be diminished.

For the period reference, you can check this blog post.

Inventory Adapter

The third and fourth wizard panels are the Inventory Adapter Type panel which let you choose your business application (where the inventory data will be retrieved from), and the Connection String panel that lets you enter the database connection string associated to the business application.

If your business application does not appear in the list, do not hesitate to drop us an email at support@lokad.com. We will see what we can do to support your application as well. If your application is custom, then you can use the LSSC Editor the design your own inventory adapter.

Tip: save your report. After completing the report setup wizard, we suggest to save the report using File » Save to be sure not to loose your settings.

Generating the report

Once you have completed the report setup wizard (see the previous section for more details). You need to generate your report by clicking the Refresh button. This button will start a complete refresh of your report (retrieving the latest inventory data and the latest forecasts).

Note that the full refresh takes over 1h, mostly due to the fact that the forecasts retrieval is delayed of 1h after the upload toward Lokad. Check our small guide to forecasts retrieval for more details.

You can also perform a manual / partial report refresh through Tools»Partial refresh operations.

Understanding the report

The LSSC report includes quite a few columns (check this report screenshot). This section describe the purpose of each column.

What's an SKU? SKU means Storage Keeping Unit. If you have only one storage location, then, most likely, there will be no difference between your product references, and your SKU references. If you have multiple storage locations then a single product reference can be associated to multiple SKUs.

Which data gets uploaded to Lokad? The report contains many data columns, but only the past demand gets uploaded to Lokad. The other data columns (Ex: suppliers) are NOT transmitted to Lokad.

SKU names

The name or reference that defines each SKU.

Product name

The product name or reference associated to the SKU.

Supplier

The supplier name or identifier associated to the SKU.

On hand

The stock on hand within the SKU (i.e. the number of items readily available).

Reorder point

The suggested amount of inventory that should trigger a replenishment order. Ex: if the stock on hand becomes smaller than the reorder point, we suggest to make a replenishment order.

The report point is computed based on the forecasted demand, the service level and the lead time. The column will stay blank as long as you do not have retrieved your forecasts.

Service level

The service level indicates the chosen probability of not encountering a shortage. Typical service level values range from 80% to 99.9% depending on the business requirements. The higher the service level, the higher the reorder point.

The service level is represented as a percentage. Values are in the range 1 .. 100 (exclusive). Note that a service level equal to 100% would be equivalent to an infinite safety stock.

Lead time

The lead time indicates the total time needed between the reorder and the stock on hand replenishment. This value typically depends on your supplier constraints.

The lead time is expressed in days.

Stock cover

The stock cover indicates how much time the current inventory will last before encountering a shortage if no reorder is made. This value is computed based on the stock on hand and the forecasted demand.

Stock cover is expressed in days. The column will stay blank as long as you haven't retrieved the forecasts.

F column

The column named F contains check-boxes (all checked by default) that indicate whether the SKUs should be forecasted or not. Indeed, the Lokad subscription price depends on the number of forecasting tasks. Thus, you might consider that some SKUs are not worth to be forecasted (ex: SKUs with very low sales volumes).

MAPE

MAPE stands for Mean Approximate Percentage Error, it's the expected error associated to the forecasted demand. Statistical forecasts are always subject to errors (simply because the future can't be exactly deduced from past data), yet Lokad is providing not only the forecasts, but also the expected forecast errors. The MAPE values are used to refine the suggested reorder points based on the specified service levels.

MAPE is expressed as a percentage. The column will stay blank as long as you haven't retrieved the forecasts.

Past demand

Past demand columns are represented with dates used as column headers, and the cell's backgrounds are yellow. The past demand typically reflects either sales (retail) or consumption (manufacturing).

Forecasted demand

Forecasted demand columns are represented with dates used as column headers, and the cell's backgrounds are orange. The forecasted demand is computed by Lokad using the the past demand as input.

Editing the report

Certain column headers are in bold (check this screenshot for an example). This font style indicates that the data of this column cannot be retrieved from the 3^rd party application (ex: most eCommerce software do not support lead time). When the data cannot be directly retrieved, the user is invited to manually complete the column by entering its own data.

You need first to retrieve your inventory data (using the Retrieve button), in order to start completing the report. Once you've edited your report, we suggest to save your changes using File » Save to be sure that your work does not get lost.

Certain columns will stay blank as long some data is missing. For example, reorder point will stay blank as long as you haven't provided a desired service level.

The next time you perform an inventory retrieval, your edits will NOT be discarded. The SKUs of the report will simply be updated with the most recent data as extracted from your business application.

Tips

This section contains a couple of useful tricks for LSSC.

Mass update

(Starting from v1.2) You can select a row by clicking on the extreme left column (a small triangle appears when the row is selected), and then copy the row with the copy shortcut CTRL+C. Then, select all the rows were you want to past the data, and paste your data with paste shortcut CTRL+V. All the writable columns values will be copied to destination rows.

Sorting the report

You can sort any column on the report by clicking on the column header.

For example, if you want to sort the SKU against their respective suppliers (in order to facilitate the replenishment order), just click on Suppliers.

Troubleshooting with the event logs

In case you would be encountering issues with Retrieve, Upload or Download operations, you can display the Event logs through View » Event Logs.

Clearing your account

You can remove all the data stored in your Lokad account through Tools » Clear account.

Custom inventory adapters

Note: this section is slightly more technical.

LSSC can natively retrieve data from numerous 3^rd party applications. For every application, LSSC includes an inventory adapter. This adapter is nothing but an XML file that wraps the SQL queries used to retrieve the data.

Yet, in many situations, the default set of inventory adapters might not be sufficient (ex: custom in-house business application). Thus, we provide LSSC Editor, a GUI tool, bundled with LSSC, that lets you easily design custom SQL queries for your application.