Major Improvements & Features
New StockIQ Planner Dashboard & Updated Alerts
This version of StockIQ brings a brand new Planner Dashboard. We've listened to your feedback on making the home screen more useful for the day-to-day users.
Now, your most important alerts are front-and-center on the home page. Your top 5 alerts in each category are shown right on the front page for you to act on, prioritized by whatever is most important for that alert.
Right-click to navigate directly to act on each alert, all while keeping your spot on the home page.
Additionally, you have one tab for each module within StockIQ, where we've grouped the most important metrics for each area of concern.
Updated Executive Summary
The daily planners don't get all the fun! Also updated and extended is the Executive Dashboard, with new details at higher levels of grouping, including a new stratification tab.
Extended is the Opportunity vs Investment tab, which has more information on where your inventory is sitting, and where you can save money.
More Intuitive Alerts
We have separated out some alerts to make them more intuitive, and added a few others. As well, when suspending alerts, we now save the most recent alert reason and dates you have provided to help reduce repeat data entry.
- The "Projected Available" alert has been separated out into two separate alerts -- Projected Stock Outs, and the Projected Excess Alert, and put on their own new screens, so that your actions to resolve the alerts are easier. (See below)
- The "Forecast Vs Actuals" has been separated out into Over Forecasted and Under Forecasted alerts in their own screens for the same reason -- your actions on over- or under-forecasted items will be different, and we an show more detail in the tabs.
- Unusual Sale Alert - a new alert for making you aware of highly divergent or high value unusual sales is now available, further helping to point out when there are unusual sales.
- Large Min/Mult Alert - Dovetailing on the new Max Stock vs Preferred Max Stock logic, a large min mult alert will be shown for items where supplier minimums and multiples are causing you to have stock issues.
Open-In-New-Window Navigation
Many grids and other items in StockIQ now have an addition to their context menu where you can open the selected item in a new window, such as in Forecast Manager, or Order Schedule.
Additionally, the Settings in the admin section all now open in their own new window, allowing you to keep your place when searching for or modifying multiple settings.
Stock Out Root Cause Analysis
This version of StockIQ lends some help to trying to determine the root cause of a stock-out. We've enhanced the Stock Outs Screen with additional tabs of information to track your stock-outs, including the new Root Cause analysis and Expedite Recommendations.
Excess Root Cause Analysis
Additionally, we're trying to help you find out reasons for any excess with a new Excess Root Cause Analysis feature, available in the Excess & Overstock screen, and the Projected Excess Screen.
Statistical Forecast Band
A new light red band appears on the Forecast Manager screen. The red shaded area signifies the expected error range in which the forecast of this SKU may lie in a given time period, based on the expected statistical model error as shown in the 'Forecast Error' tab. The smaller the band area, the more precise the statistical model is able to predict the forecast. You may see a larger band area for SKUs with very little demand history and highly sporadic demand.
The purpose of the band is to give the users a visualization of what the accuracy of the statistical model looks like, and the range of future possible error on the forecast.
Expedite Report w/ Projected Stockouts Screen
A new Projected Stockouts screen, in which the projected stock out alert has been separated from the order schedule, includes lots of detail about projected stock outs and how to prevent them, including the new Supply Order Expedite Recommendations.
De-Expedite Report w/ Projected Excess Screen
On the flip side of the coin, a new Projected Excess screen, in which the projected excess alert has also been separated out from the order schedule screen, is lots of detail about projected excess, and how to de-expedite orders, including the new Supply Order De-Expedite Recommendations.
Preferred Max Stock vs Max Stock
We have extended and updated our definitions on max stock and excess to help differentiate between causes of overstock or excess, and what the solutions to them might be. Please note that this may mean a change in what you see as your overall 'Excess' dollar amount on the Executive dashboard. See Overstocked and Planned Overstock vs Excess
Substitutes Wizard
The Place Orders screen has had the Substitutes feature for a long time. This new version adds the ability to apply substitutes many at one time, using the new Substitutes Wizard.
External Lost Sales Data Feeds
Since many of you are explicitly tracking lost sales in systems external to StockIQ, this new version allows you to import lost sales from your ERP or other external systems via a new data feed. Please contact us if you would like to start integrating external lost sales with StockIQ. This can be configured in the Global Lost Sales Settings screen.
Chart Exports
Most charts now have a context menu option to export as an image, PDF, or data for use in your report building efforts.
Inventory Exchange Curve Simulation
Clicking on a safety stock value in the "Safety Stock" tab in Forecast Manager and elsewhere gives you the inventory exchange curve, which shows the tradeoff of service level versus inventory investment for a product. New in this version of StockIQ is the ability to run simulations on changing usage, lead time, model error, etc.
Order Policy Stock / De-Stock Report
A new screen in the inventory module, the Order Policies Screen, shows a report of order policy data, including what is coming from the ERP, versus what StockIQ believes the order policy should be. You can get a report of items where there is order policy variance, recommended-for-stock, and recommended-for-de-stock
Site Level Targets on Order Wizard
When you have a multi-site order and you are using Order Wizard to reach some targets, you can now specify a target for each site in your order, rather than a single target for all sites in your order.
Auto-Select Seasonality Level
Seasonality Detection has been improved with a new option in the Seasonality Settings to try and auto-select the seasonality which leads to the lowest forecast error at or above your current position in the forecast hierarchy. This gives the best of both worlds of being responsive to individual item characteristics, while allowing higher-level trends to be detected.
Minor Improvements
- Run Container Loading from the Supply Orders Screen
- Drop Ship Wizard enhancements to edit quantity, cost, notes, etc.
- Bulk upload for various lost-customer screens
- Order Cycles bulk upload
- Enhance Lead Time Variance screen to check for PO's that are also late to ship
- Improvements to Historical-Promotion-Matching logic
- Add customer category information to Sales & Margin screen
- Add current on-hand, target, max info to sawtooth tab in place orders screen
- Add ability to set vendor priority in Place Orders, Step 1
- Improve order cycle calculation for very low usage items
- add categories to lot expiration screen
- Add blanket PO association information to Open Supply Orders screen
- Add categories to Place Blankets screen
- Add controls for sawtooth interval in place orders tab to make it easier to swap more quickly
- Add "Match" mode to Buy To Order order planning to coordinate with production schedules.
- Add order creation date, note, and customer categories to unusual sales screen
- Allocation Wizard improvements
- Add order cubes and weight to order history header in Order History Screen
- Improvements to "Prorate First Period" forecasting option
- Allow 53-week years in Custom Seasonality Indeces
- Add week numbering options to follow US or EU week numbering conventions
- Add category info to various "Inactive Item" screens
- Add view saving capability to Data Validation screen
- Forecast Algorithm will use non-seasonal trend on an item with a custom or forced highly seasonal pattern when there is insufficient data for a full highly seasonal calculation
- Add a prompt when user tries to save a forecast for non-stock / obsolete forecast items
- Add option to include or exclude items with inactive order policies during allocation wizard
- Add app notifications for expiring license warnings and version upgrade notices
- Misc columns in Place Orders Step 2
- Add ability to merge multiple lines into 1 line when doing order merging