Product Update - June 2020

I hope this email finds you well. We have a lot of exciting announcements this time, so this Update will be longer than usual. Let's take a look.

New AIMMS Release

• We have upgraded the ODH-CPLEX Add-on (version 5). This can be hugely beneficial for complex scheduling models, or models that decompose well. If you want to try it out, let us know!  
• A new Scaling Tool in the Math Program Inspector prevents numerical instability and/or performance issues due to poor scaling. This is a unique tool in the market and can be tremendously helpful to improve your models with limited effort.
• Our Function Reference is now accessible directly from the modeling IDE.  
• Many of the WebUI improvements we shared in earlier Product Updates are included in this release. These range from Item Actions for chart widgets to date sorting in tables and improved Bubble Chart sizing.  

WebUI Developments 

Speaking of WebUI improvements, we are also working on:

• Page Layout V2: We are making good progress on the improved layout of your pages and started our initial test with our own SC Navigator Apps. The feedback and results so far are encouraging. As you can see in the screenshot below, we have made a better use of real estate and improved resizing. 
  
   

  

   

• Filter for table data: Soon, end users will be able to filter table data. This is especially handy for tables with large data sets, where scrolling is not ideal.

• Date Time Picker: We still have some work to do on the Date Time Picker. We hope to release it this summer and provide you with best practices on how to leverage this in applications that are used in multiple time zones. 

Improvements in SC Navigator Apps

Demand Forecasting

It’s been 3 months since the first release of Demand Forecasting Navigator and we have gathered lots of feedback from customers. We have focused on the following UI improvements: 

• A more intuitive workflow 
• Easy and quick navigation to move from one forecast record to another, and a zoom functionality to work at different levels in the forecast pyramid 

• Quickly understand where you are in the process and review open tasks
• Summary views to see totals by product, customer, and location groupings 
• The ability to add additional reference lines to the forecast chart; previous, top down, and bottom up forecasts. 

We have also worked on: 

• An option to adjust the amount of history used to generate the statistical model 
• An option to add a damping factor to any models that include a trend 
• A refinement to the learning algorithm to more heavily weight the impact of recent history

We’re excited about this major update to the app and expect it to be released around the end of this month. 

Inventory Planning

Our Inventory Planning App is coming soon. It will allow users to answer the following three questions: 

• For network design, what’s the inventory consequence of my network design? 
• For S&OP, what inventory targets should I use to support my desired service levels? 
• For inventory planners, what’s the health of my current inventory position? 

Stay tuned! We will provide more details in the next Product Update.

Python Integration 

Based on our experience with the R-link, trends in building computational landscapes and discussions with customers, we have made a strategic turn in our Python Integration project:

• We will make it more generic, supporting multiple scripting languages 
• We will not provide facilities for running scripts, those are widely available and needs vary greatly among customers

As a result, we will develop: 

• An AIMMS library to interact with external (computational) services that support REST API calls  
• An AIMMS library for format conversions (e.g. JSON to AIMMS identifiers)

Our new Supporting Scripting Services will give our customers ultimate flexibility in using the service of their choice (now and in the future). It will also allow them to leverage and customize their own scripting deployment environments and/or make use of specialized third party deployment services (such as Azure Functions or AWS Lambda). Reach out if you would like to learn more.

Deprecated Functionality 

AIMMS PRO Cluster

We have deprecated the AIMMS PRO Cluster as it was too complex to maintain. For most customers, the AIMMS Cloud Platform provides the scaling and business continuity features that the AIMMS PRO Cluster was intended to provide. We will soon publish documentation to assist you with this change. If you are considering using the AIMMS PRO Cluster, please contact us so we can work with you to find the best approach.

Tableau TDE Provider

We have deprecated the Tableau Datalink Provider. Our focus has moved to making good, general data interfaces possible, so our customers can use of those to connect with any tools available. Customers using the Tableau Datalink Provider can convert the data to a regular data txt representation (instead of creating TDE-files) and enable any update needs within the Tableau product itself. 

Please let me know if this update was useful in the comments below.