Major Improvements & Features
- New Hierarchy Flexibility - This new version of StockIQ includes a big step forward in the flexibility in your forecast hierarchy. You can now include multiple customer-related categories in your hierarchy, such as channel, region, or other properties you may be interested in. Further, you can configure a "customer focused" hierarchy where customer-related properties are above your item information in the hierarchy.
- Blanket PO Management + Releases - In this release, Blanket PO's are now a first-class member of StockIQ. The new Blanket Purchase Orders screen allows you to see what blanket orders exist, what lines are on those blankets, and what releases have been made against those blankets. Execution of releases against these blankets can be controlled in the Blankets Tab of the Place Orders screen.
- NOTE: Creation of Blanket PO's in StockIQ is coming in the next release
- Item Life Cycles / Short Life Cycle Planning - The Life Cycle feature adds features for introducing new parts. StockIQ will track the shape and quantity for life cycles of your products at different levels of your hierarchy, allowing you to have StockIQ automatically generate a new product forecast based on the aggregate and historical behavior of its siblings. This can work for long-lived products, and especially short life cycle products for which you have a known introduction/peak/trail off type of pattern. A New Part Setup screen allows you to import many of these at once, and all you have to provide is a rough estimate of its peak volume
- Multi-Select in Forecast Manager - You can you select multiple items in the Forecast Manager item selection grid, allowing for ad-hoc investigation of how certain groups, items, sites, etc. are changing over time.
- New Item-Site tab in Forecast Manager - For ease of use when you have forecast groups and/or a customer-focused hierarchy, we have added a new selection tab that is always at the item-site level, so you can always see your total forecast for an item-site, regardless of your hierarchy configuration.
- Lost Sales Screen - Answering a frequent request, the new Lost Sales screen in the Forecast Module allows you to view individual lost sales and stockouts of your items.
- Site Groups - This version of StockIQ introduces the ability to configure Site Groups, e.g. groups of warehouses, such as "USA Warehouses" or "Northeast", or even "All Warehouses" Site Groups provide the ability to view your inventory in useful aggregates to answer questions such as "Am I excess in North America?" or "Do I have enough in this region to avoid a new purchase order?" New columns to help with this are included in the Stockouts screen, Excess screen, and Supply Order Line Grid.
- Expedited LT Wizard - Via the new Expedite Wizard, StockIQ now includes the ability to analyze what portion of your order should be expedited to prevent stock outs or low stock, using any expedited lead time information you can feed to the system. Additionally, StockIQ will check for expedite opportunities in the order validations to make sure you're avoiding stockouts whenever possible.
- Forecast By Revenue, COGS, or Margin - Now you can do your forecasting by units-of-measure other than just Units. You can now enter forecasts in Revenue, Cost-of-goods-sold (COGS), or even Margin, and StockIQ will apply proper top-down / middle-down, or bottom-up adjustments. You can enter these at any level of your forecast hierarchy that you wish, just like any unit forecast. Even better, this takes advantage of our recent improvements in calculating average cost and price by customer and by forecast group, so your revenue projections will be better than ever. You can bulk import forecasts in any UoM in the Import Forecasts screen, and edit/view them in Forecast Manager using the Forecast Manager Display Options to switch between forecast UoM's.
- Edit Child Forecasts & Edit Child Seasonality - Updates to the previous "Edit Child Forecast" and "Edit Child Seasonality" dialogs now allow you to make the same cross-cutting forecast or seasonality changes at any level of your forecast hierarchy, with whatever matches you select. This allows for much easier cross-hierarchy changes without requiring top-down forecasts. See more in Edit Child Forecasts and Edit Child Seasonality topics.
- Auto-Database Cleanup - Adding to the existing self-database maintenance, StockIQ will now automatically delete item, sites, item-sites, etc. that are not present in the data extracts for more than 6 months
- Net Change / Partial Load Logic - Many parts of StockIQ now have net change / partial load logic available to help speed startup time for larger instances, or multiple refreshes per day.
- Load Balancing Enhancements - Item/Site/Supplier load balancing is now much more flexible and able to balance between vendors much more accurately, typically within < 1% variation from target on a given item.
- ABC Import - You can now import your external or ERP-generated ABC classes into StockIQ, if you wish to use those instead of StockIQ's classes
- Add Build-To-Order visibility in Order Schedule - To help understand how your components are being planned on Build To Order items, we've added columns to the Order Schedule Detail to be able to visualize the plans coming from the parent build-to-order items.
- Show Product Images - StockIQ has added the ability to see images of your products within the application if a publicly available URL with an image of the product is available. Requires only one small change to your item data feed.
- Supplier Cost Change Tracking - StockIQ now has the ability for you to enter information about supplier cost changes, such as year-end price hikes. StockIQ will track these and warn you when the cost change is getting close, so as to encourage additional purchasing at your lower price.
Minor Improvements
- Enhance Inactive Records screen to allow for selecting which records you wish to delete
- Add small note to Forecast Analysis and Service Level Analysis to indicate how often they are updated
- Add Active Supplier Level column in substitutes to make it easer to select which substitute you wish to use.
- Add template for item-level pricebreak (aka Matrix pricing) bulk uploads
- Add import-time checks for data quality / percent errors, as well as record deletion checks to identify integration issues
- Add checking for current onhand at co-manufacturers during the Co-man transfer sync
- Accept/Reject all buttons in batch-edit order prompt suggestions dialog/popup
- Update Turns screen with additional columns and show all data in grid for reporting / export. Update chart.
- Update Service Level screen to show all data in grid for reporting
- Add new Turns and Service Level charts to home dashboard
- Update inventory over time chart for readability
- Add version to system status popup on home screen
- Enhance item-site activity filters to filter out more items that are inactive even if they are in BoM or hub/spoke associations.
- Add Item-Site notes to various screens
- Add ability to configure / override replenishment consumption by item-site
- Misc Place Orders column additions
- Add filters to Validation screen
- Add grid layout save icons to Order Schedule popups
- Improve ordering behavior when have order cycles configured
- Add filters and additional facts to missing item site supplier report
- Add the ability to set number of years of history and previous year history weights in Seasonality settings of Forecast Manager
- Add export for Executive Summary grids
- Add ability to see forecast vs actuals for all forecast series in Forecast Vs Actuals
- Add option in Firm and Planned screen to show plans with/without load balancing applied
- Add misc. facts to Inventory Balancing / Suggested Transfers screen
- Excel XLSX import for forecast and event imports
- Add UsagePattern and Inventory Position to Inventory Expiration report
- Add ability to do container loading by Equivalency Units
Additional Integrations
- Amazon / FBA Restock Report - Enhancements to reading the Amazon restock report for folks using Amazon FBA
- ExternalId field - we have added an "externalId" field to key entities (Item, Supplier etc.) to make linking/integrating with ERP easier when transmitting data back to the ERP.
Bug Fixes
- Add logging for when a co-man transfer is ignored due to bogus dates on the co-man PO/WO
- Cannot upload an order to Place Orders with the same item-site specified more than once.
- Usage Patterns not calculated if no items are forecasted monthly
- Supply Orders not updated if casing of order number differs between ERP and SIQ
- current period projection can be capped to less than actual sales if sales have been very high
- simulating receipt can cause red toast under certain conditions
- Having > 6 demand forecast series can cause refresh failure
- Fix allocation wizard causing "the edited line was not found..." error
- Do not generate backorder alerts for system-generated demand records
- Resource load can miss certain items from Resource Bill in capacity planning
- Dead stock chart does not honor zero on hands option in Dead Stock screen
- Purchase orders in released status don't show up in firm and planned firm quantities
- Error messages while trying to import forecast on inactive items
- Create event from sales order super slow
- old calculated LT's are not cleared if we fall below threshold of enough shipments to calculate LT
- FCAL not honored in all scenarios
- error trying to replan items with LT overrides in some cases
- fix on-order totals in Executive Summary incorrect
- Replacement error can cause refresh failure in some cases
- Missing days/weeks of supply values in exec summary in some cases
- Last Date In Stock incorrect when using available as the stockout reference
- Click on supplier detail in BoM popup shows wrong supplier possibly
- Using "Ship Date" coverage mode can cause error in some cases
- en-ZA culture can screw up number formatting / CLDR fix
- Allow import of custom tables via sync agent / on-prem ERP with hosted SIQ
- asterisks do not appear on on-hand quantity in substitutes grid in Place Orders