NETSTOCK releases new inventory forecast engine

NETSTOCK, developers of the cloud-based Inventory Management solution by the same name, have announced the release of their new forecast engine. NETSTOCK has, until now, used an outsourced forecast engine for its inventory management app. Although this engine has performed well for the application over the years, NETSTOCK’s CTO Barry Kukkuk decided it was time to develop their own. 

“Forecast engines available in the market are generally very open-ended and can accommodate a broad spectrum of forecasting needs, from stock market forecasting through to budgeting. This broad range does not speak to the unique needs required for inventory items.  We wanted to develop an engine that we could focus on the specific forecasting needs of our customers,” Kukkuk said. “Developing our own engine means we have full control over the feature set that we include. We can also continue to add new forecasting methods and settings. With the advancements made to machine learning as an example, we have the extensibility to include that technology. Furthermore, we are not dependent on external third-party developers to make changes and additions as we were previously with our outsourced engine.”

The programming language that NETSTOCK chose to use lends well to numerical processing is super fast and reads well – making it easy for any developer to learn. It has a “just in time” compiler, which means the more forecasts users perform, the quicker it becomes. The engine runs as an elastic microservice, which means that it will scale with the number of customers NETSTOCK serves.

“Given the tens of millions of stock items we process for our customers and our wealth of knowledge gained over the last 30 years of inventory optimization, we believe we have developed a unique engine that not only accommodates a wide variety of demand types but is suitable for a variety of industries”, Kukkuk said.

Being able to adjust the forecast settings gives more flexibility for NETSTOCK customers, and they are able to amend this for anomalies that may have occurred from a sales or operations perspective. 

A few other exciting settings include:

• Lost sales compensation

• Reactivity setting 

• Seasonality

• Maximum growth and maximum decline

Next on the roadmap for NETSTOCK is an advanced forecasting module designed for customers that have more sophisticated forecasting needs. 

“Without getting into all the details, one of the features provides group seasonal forecasting. We aggregate all items in a specific group’s history together and base the forecast on the aggregate data. This would be useful when a customer wants to add a new item that has no sales history but has been identified as a seasonal item and will then form part of that group’s seasonality profile,” Kukkuk concluded.

About NETSTOCK

About NETSTOCK
NETSTOCK is the global developer of the NETSTOCK inventory replenishment and demand planning application, which connects with a wide variety of ERP systems on the market. The app is an affordable, secure, cloud-based solution that enables SMBs to minimize stock-outs, reduce excess inventory, and free up working capital.
The NETSTOCK app connects to ERP data to produce quality forecasts, reduce the time spent on manual tasks, and solve for the optimal investment required to achieve target fill rates. Implementation is brief and inexpensive, delivering an impressive return on investment rapidly. Learn more about this acclaimed inventory management solution currently employed by more than 1,500 companies globally by visiting www.netstock.co.