Q: Do you have an opinion about Oniqua’s Optimiser – we have it in use here. It certainly has very good reporting but as far as forcasting we have struggled to get it right. Their settings are over the top and therefore wrong imputs have given bad results.
A: What can I say about Optimizer?
- I have never actually seen or used the product.
- I have however been approached by user companies that have not been happy with the software – hence they were approaching me. But this also means that my experience does not include success stories.
- Their unhappiness appears to stem from the old garbage-in, garbage out principal – that is, the software requires data that actually reflects needs rather than past actions and so if the data is not right the results are a nonsense. In this case I don’t just mean ‘clean’ data that is accurate (although I do know of one case where Optimizer was being put to use in a company with woeful data accuracy) I also mean where special events or known ‘mis-issues’ of the items have been addressed. Almost impossible to do.
- On another occasion I was told by a company that Optimizer had identified an $XM reduction opportunity – they were not too happy when I pointed out that, with the right spreadsheet, I could have done the same in 15 minutes.
With respect to software calculators generally, if a company’s problem is that they have a huge number of stock outs and they can’t ID which items are important then this type of tool may help, but then it may not, depending upon history and so on.
One thing that I think for sure is that it will lead to overstocking because they don’t consider all of the possible actions that can be taken for optimizing inventory, they only consider a highly constrained model.
If the issue is one of inventory optimization, then there are far simpler, more reliable, and from a team development perspective much better approaches. Although I would say that because that is what I do!