Lokad delivers forecasting as a cloud-based, on-demand service that requires little or no manpower on the retailer side. Because it is pay-per-use and delivered by the cloud, the new service can be implemented quickly and cost-effective.
In-house forecasting solutions also often are very costly. They require hiring at least one qualified statistician, designing a clever model for the business, and purchasing expensive software licenses and servers to run the computations. These costs are so high that only very large companies can usually afford them. And the results often remain unsatisfactory.
“Classically, forecasting a large number of product sales requires manually building and tweaking a model for every single reference – a laborious process that would require larger retailers to hire a dozen statisticians to complete the job,” said Joannes Vermorel, CEO of Lokad.
“At Lokad, we leverage the unprecedented processing capabilities offered by Windows Azure in order to automate the whole forecasting process, assessing the best forecasting model for every product and establishing correlations between products. The results are more accurate forecasts, delivered within 60 minutes instead of months, and at a cost that simply doesn't compare to classical solutions.”