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Why choose Salescast over competitors?
If your forecasting engine looks like this,
we advise to urgently upgrade to Lokad.
Before answering this question, we would like to emphasize that our firm believes that when it comes to statistical demand forecasting,
there is no substitute for a test on your
real life data. We can only discourage you from taking anyone's word for it! When we claim (which we do!) to have
the most accurate forecasting technology on the market, we suggest giving a free try to Salescast. See for yourself how good Lokad is compared to alternatives, either competitors or a status quo in your company. The good news is that getting started with Salescast takes about 1/10th of the effort typically required by most forecasting systems on the market.
Looking at the big picture, Lokad is
not your usual demand forecasting solution. If you're already familiar with our competitors' offers, Lokad may puzzle you at first, so let's correctly position our technology compared to most classical approaches.
First of all, many of our competitors sell forecasting toolkits, which give users a lot of freedom in choice of forecasting models. But what appears as freedom, we believe to be rather a burden: You become responsible for carefully choosing the most accurate statistical model for each of your products. This requires a lot of skill and a lot of ongoing efforts as well, as the models need to be refreshed on a regular basis.
Salescast delivers forecasts
as a service, which implies a number of differences to classic forecasting toolkits.
Go for modern automation.
: You don't need to know anything about statistics because this part is entirely managed by us for you. We pull your data, and we send you back the results. Contrary to the forecasting toolkits, this process requires close to zero manpower - we provide
full automation. Obviously, it means that, in a way, your company is giving up on actually producing its own statistical forecasts. However in exchange you get a
higher accuracy in your forecasts. And not every company is able to gather and afford a team of talented statisticians and manage their work.
No investment: Absolutely no investment is necessary to use Lokad, neither in software licenses, nor hardware, implementation projects, training of employees.
Pay only for what you consume: You only incur a cost, when you refresh a forecast.
Low cost: The total cost of ownership (TCO) is significantly reduced via automation and an on-demand business model. In case of larger customers - to approximately 1/10 of the TCO of competing solutions.
Secondly,
for many of our competitors, forecasting is only a non-strategic component within a much larger supply chain solution. Indeed, supply chain is very vast to say the least. Software can improve productivity, reliability, reactivity, etc. in a lot of ways. Demand forecasting is only a small piece of a much bigger puzzle. As a result, within those wide-spectrum supply solutions, there are so many functional areas that need immediate attention from a software company (just think of the impact of RFID and mobile technologies on supply chain over the last decade), that the
software company simply cannot afford to invest much in the forecasting component, which requires highly-specialized skills of its own.
Contrary to those general, supply-chain-wide solutions, Lokad takes a razor-sharp angle:
we only focus on statistical demand forecasting. That's all we do. We believe that this is through this focus that we are presently outperforming competitors both in terms of forecasting accuracy, and also in terms of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) for the forecasting solution. Yet, it also means that Lokad isn't even intended as a supply chain silver bullet. In order to make the most out of Lokad, you typically need complementary apps, such as an inventory management system, an ERP or an accounting package.