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

warehouse

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.