New Features: Automated Outlier Removal,

This morning we updated DemandCaster with five significant features.

1. Automated Outliers Edits: Outliers are points in an items historical demand that are out of the normal distribution. These are often caused by one time demand events that create a significant spike in demand. These spikes when left unchanged become included in the items safety stock calculation. Since safety stock is based on the standard deviation of an items history relative to forecast, the spike will cause the safety stock quantity to increase to compensate for the potential of a similar occurrence in the future. The new feature allows these outliers to be removed automatically as opposed to manually. You simply enable it for an item and choose the number of iterations to remove. The more iterations the smoother the historical demand. We suggest no more than one iteration to prevent the history from become excessively smooth.


2. Bill of Material and Aggregate Sandbox and Holdback: The term sandbox is used in the realm of software development where code or content changes can be tested without affecting the original system. In DemandCaster the sandbox is where you can make changes to an item before deciding to permanently save the changes made. Until now, the sandbox was available for only distribution items that are independently forecasted. Manufactured items and items that are a part of an aggregated forecast are now sandbox compatible.


3. Small Screen Layout Improvements: If you are a user of an iPad (as I am) or a netbook, DemandCaster has been further optimized to work on these small screens.


4. Optimal Inventory Spreadsheet: One of the available dashlets in the dashboard interface is Optimal Inventory. Optimal Inventory compares your current inventory against a theoretical optimal when considering the deployed planning settings i.e. safety stocks, forecasts, reorder points, etcetera. Like all our dash-lets, clicking on the graph/table reveals the source data and provides a link to download the data as an excel spreadsheet. The new Optimal Inventory excel spreadsheet download has been enhanced to include additional information.


5. Hold Back Testing Enhancement: We have enhanced the hold back testing process. Hold Back testing is launched from the forecast detail interface. It allows the user to hold back up to 6 months of history and compare actual against the forecast that would have been performed at that time. Because of this, we will increase the historical order period we are extracting from ERP from 3 to 3.5 years.

We would also like to take this time to announce our new help site. Though it is a work in progress, we are striving to populate the site with articles and videos that will be helpful to our current and prospective users. As mentioned, we will be posting videos to the site by Monday covering the improvements launched today. We also ask that you email us at support@demandcaster.com with all your questions and issues as they arise. This allows us to better track issues and provides you with a portal to view the progress of your requests. When you email us at support, you will receive an email that will ask you to register on the site.

As with any significant upgrade, there may be a bug that slipped through a crack in our testing. If you encounter any issues, please email us at support@demandcaster.com.

Thank you all for your ongoing support and, as always, happy planning!