Time series forecasting can sometimes become Web 2.0…

Posted on February 22, 2007
Filed Under Economics/Business education, Save money and/or time, web 2.0 news |

It doesn’t really matter whether you are an economist, a businessman or a student. Forecasting is essential in each case. Your question is probably: businesshackers do you know any web 2.0 website to forecast time series in a web 2.0 way? Yes… we know it…

First of all why is forecasting so important?
“Adjusting your capacity and your resources to meet the customer demand is critical to ensure a high profitability: too much capacity and your money is wasted in personnel, unused inventory; too few capacity and business opportunities are lost. Yet, the demand is continuously changing in rather complicated ways”.

What is time series analysis?
“There are many ways to express a forecasting problem. Lokad specializes in time-series forecasting. Intuitively a time-series is a list of time-value pairs. For example

* daily sales for a given product in a retail store.
* weekly production orders for a manufacturing company.
* hourly volume of phone calls to a call center.
* average monthly capacity usage of a warehouse.

Lokad extends those curves into the future and provides forecasted time-series”.

How is it possible to do time series online?
“Lokad is a hosted solution. Customers send historical data to Lokad, and Lokad returns the forecasts. Lokad can be integrated into your company processes. Lokad features multi-user accounts, MS Excel forecast reports and Web Services for ERP integration”.

Pros: free, simple, easy to learn
Cons: can’t be used for serious business, kind of game
Overall mark: 8/10 (we appreciated the idea).

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Comments

2 Responses to “Time series forecasting can sometimes become Web 2.0…”

  1. Joannes Vermorel on February 25th, 2007 1:03 am

    Thank you for this post about time-series forecasting and Lokad. Yet, I do not understand your conclusion: why are you saying that Lokad can’t be used for serious business?

    (Disclaimer: I am the lead developer of Lokad.com, thus my viewpoint can be biased somehow :-)

    We are providing web services that are more scalable than traditional software solutions (i.e. desktop based solutions). Also, Lokad features continuous forecast accuracy monitoring. We are trying constantly the data in order to improve our forecasting models.

    This seems more “operational” to me than built-your-forecast-model-yourself software that were traditionally proposed by software vendors.

    Also we have started to release add-ons to facilitate 3rd party integration, see
    http://community.lokad.com

    Anyway, get a 8/10 does not feel to bad for a review :).

    Best regard,
    Joannes Vermorel

  2. ddmaca on February 25th, 2007 10:42 am

    Hi Joannes!

    I think this site is very good when you need to apply time series quickly and you don’t have complicated software to use especially in a business environment. On the whole I think it is very well done and should be promoted, that’s why we decided to give a 8/10 mark, which is not so common as you know. Lokad.com has many advantages, but the main one seems to be simplicity and the fact that there are no hidden fees. Good luck with the project!

    Dario
    Businesshackers.com

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