Empower Your Business with Sales Forecast Automation in NDAs

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retailers manufacturers typically send us data and we send back the forecast we run very intensive algorithmics we are able to deliver advanced more accurate forecasting so johannes you are the ceo of locad tell us a little bit about what the company is so locate delivers forecasting as a service so retailers manufacturers typically send us data and we send back the forecast the process is completely robotized so no special no knowledge is required um from statistics or analytics look at is handling the entire process for the client and so when you say we our sales forecasting as a service there's a big cloud element to that take us through what that process looks like and then tell us how you relate to cloud computing okay so located is typically the sort of technology that would not exist without the cloud so when the client is going to start pushing data toward locate we are going to instantiate several hundreds or even to several thousand servers during a very short period of time we will run very intensive algorithmics so we are able to deliver i would say advanced more accurate forecasting and we very quickly de-allocate all those servers and those servers are running on windows azure windows azure give us the flexibility to allocate that many servers to deallocate them very fast so that we can keep the cost extremely low for the client in the end and basically with the cloud we can achieve a complete automation uh without any limits concerning the the scalability of the of the solution so if you're a cio and you're wondering how this works basically what we're talking about here is this idea of elasticity and scalability the cloud provides so as a cio or a vp of sales maybe it's probably more appropriate here you might have a lot of data that you need to mine through in order to get some forecast and accuracy behind that well instead of doing that in-house you're i guess uploading into look ad and then look at does its magic it do it does it within hours which allows them to use the benefits of the cloud for you and for them and spits back the results now the big question here of course is security why as a cio or as a vp of sales would i give you my data so there is there is several items here first is a matter of principle i mean look at apply in nda on all prospect of client data so that's that's the principle then considering the facts locate relies on windows azure which i believe is probably one of the most if not the most secure competing environment available on the market today so by choosing locad you're choosing a very proven and very secure computing environment and then locate itself uh we have several techniques one of them being application knowing that we don't need to have the actual product names we don't need to have the actual product information we can have just a raw identifier being pushed to look at so we have only raw data no product names no supplier names etc so no sensitive information and we just return raw forecasts for further consumption within uh the client system so this is an interesting model because in your own organization today you might have a team of statisticians that are doing the similar type of work where you invest in training and you invest in software here what we're talking about is the model through which you provide this company your data and they do the statistical analysis and spit back the forecast to you now on the issue of security you have obviously ndn and you have principles and you have security and force in the platform what are the the ways that i can get data to you i guess i upload them to your site but you also have connectors tell us a little bit about how that works yeah exactly so we typically have our primary forecasting engine hosted on windows azure and then we have an integration engine also hosted on windows azure called salescast silscast includes connectors for many uh typical mid-market erps or accounting packages for the us market maybe one of the mainstream accounting package is quickbooks by intuit so locate can natively pull data from those packages i would say through pre pre-implemented connectors but uh if you if your company does not have one of those i would say classical erp of if you have your own in-house solution then you can also expose directly a sql database and locate will be able to remotely connect to the sql database to pull the data and re-inject the forecast into this sql database locate really focused on the process not the reporting on or the actual inventory management so you just expose the data in a way that is very convenient sql databases and we do the rest so there are three ways to get the data and to look at the first way is go to the website and then provide your data there you can decide to mask the data or give them the straight data secondly they have 50 or so connectors where you can then ask them to pull the data strictly through the connectors and then i guess the third way is to create a sql azure instance and load your data into sql azure and then look at takes it from there now say that you got me on that now give me examples how big of a data we're talking about what customers are using it and how quickly do they get insights out of the data so i would say the largest client we ever did full web without ever meeting this client was basically about 100 million transaction i can't decide the name but it's a it's a us retention of uh 530 points and that was a completely full web and they get started directly on the web on our website so how many rows are again so uh 100 million transactions 100 million for a client that that we have an agreement to speak up for the boys oskaro.com that's the number one uh automotives per part retailer in europe and uh they have 300 300 000 product references that the company that has been doubling in size for the last five years and the main issue was that with a catalog of 300 000 products no no forecasting solution the market was able to scale to that number of products and here the issue was not only the fact that there is many products the point was how much uh manpower do you need to uh to make the forecasting system work if you need an army of statistician to cover that many thousands of products the system is not scalable because it it requires way too many people so for example local was the only solution available they can find uh that could actually scale to the product without requiring to hire anybody so this is a great point for elasticity if you're wondering what kind of situation you might be and well there's going to be situations where you don't have enough talent the software doesn't scale and you need to go to solution like look at use the elasticity and scalability of the cloud to solve your problem now what are the types of organizations that you work with do you have to be a small organization that grows and can't predict their growth can i be a large organization what type of organizations should should use your software so look at is primarily targeting retailers world sellers of all sizes from one money commerce where you have a tiny guy having success with his e-commerce and who cannot afford to spend time on replenishment to extremely large above 400 000 employees retailers mainstream retailers who have hundreds if not thousands of hyper market supermarkets and who have two scalability challenge where classical forecasting solutions do not scale to the point of sale level uh i believe local is the first forecasting solution that then scale to uh basically 100 million skus to be processed in one hour and you don't even need to uh to to pass a phone call before you can just start pushing your data look at will auto scale to match to match the demand and we will deliver the forecast so this is a great example hopefully it's giving you some food for thoughts on on why to use lookout and want to use uh windows azure and sql azure for your solution for your perspective i know you have been in the cloud business for a long time and you teach at the university about the subject why did you go for windows azure here located as uh as a small team of mathematicians and that's the hardest thing for look at is actually to hire people that are very talented because in these specific areas that combine advanced algorithmics advanced statistics and distributed computing so the change for me as a ceo was to find a cloud computing platform where people could be extremely productive and to my knowledge windows azure was the first and it's still the only one cloud computing platform to offer a completely integrated tooling experience so you don't get only a computing platform you also get a complete integration with your development environment which is visual studio so since it's the most expensive resource for a software company is actually talented people within this azure you can get the most of the few talented people you have uh by letting them be more productive with more integrated environment such as the one you get on windows azure well thank you very much for your time johannes now uh where people need to go to find out is lookout.com.com exactly thank you very much for your time thank you very much until next time i'm bruno aziza you