About This Release
Released - May 9, 2022
This version of LS Insight supports versions 8.4 and later of LS Central On-premises and later versions of LS Central In-cloud (SaaS). Setup of LS Insight for LS Central In-cloud (SaaS) needs some additional setup from the standard LS Insight onboarding process which is explained in detail in the onboarding documentation.
In this version we have done a major upgrade on all of our standard Power BI report templates. To use the new report templates you need to upgrade LS Insight since we have some new measures and fields and have moved Member dimension > Age banding from a calculated column in the Power BI report to the data warehouse.
Note: Updating can cause your older reports to throw an error, but you can edit the reports to fit the new data warehouse schema. If you need assistance, you can contact us via LS Retail Support (login required).
We have also added two new report templates to the suite of reports Supply chain and Actionable Insights. We are in the process of testing the new reports and additions to the replication jobs for LS Central SaaS, and will release support for the new reports for LS Central SaaS in the next version of LS Insight.
We have also in this version added a web action to the scheduled run that triggers update of sales history data for LS Forecast and LS Recommend.
Note: Updates for version 2021.4 are provided in a special update package. If you have already set up version 2021.4, you can update to 2022.1 without creating a new instance of LS Insight. See update guidelines for more information. Please note that if you have customizations in your LS Insight instance, you need to make sure before you start that the updates do not affect these customizations. The update package can be run for LS Insight instances running against LS Insight SaaS, but we will not release updates for Scheduler jobs and pre-staging table additions until the next version of LS Insight.
The following is a list of changes and key features in LS Insight version 2022.1.
New or Enhanced Features
Setup
Product package
New report templates have been added to the product package. See below.
Documentation - online help
Cost information
The Azure cost calculation page has been updated with more detailed information about the Azure cost that must be paid by the customer in relation to different onboarding scenarios and number of companies and update frequency.
Dataset items
We have updated the dataset items page in accordance to the new Sales, inventory and supply chain report templates. The older one is still available.
Report pages
We have added a special page for each report template and they are all accessible from the report overview page. On this page we have embedded example reports with demo data so you can view all report pages on the page or in a browser window. These report examples are also available from the LS Central demo VM.
Data Warehouse
Database
Tables
LSInsight$SourceTables table has been update and now contains 105 source tables that are all being used by our 5 report templates.
Six new fact tales were added to the data warehouse:
fACIAlerts, fACISignals, fPurchaseCreditMemo, fPurchaseInvoice, fPurchaseOrders, fPurchaseReceipts
Stored procedures
New procedures were added for the new fact tables:
factACISignals, factACIAlerts, factPurchaseCreditMemo,factPurchaseInvoice, factPurchaseOrders, factPurchaseReceipts
Azure Data Factory
Pipelines
Fact tables
We have added six new fact table pipelines to the data factory for Actionable Insight and Purchase order fact tables:
- PL-SP-factACIAlerts
- PL-SP-factACIDiscounts
- PL-SP-factPurchaseCreditMemo
- PL-SP-factPurchaseInvoice
- PL-SP-factPurchaseOrders
- PL-SP-factPurchaseReceipts
Scheduled Run
The new fact table pipelines have been added to Scheduled Run.
We have added the PostPipelineFinish web action to the Scheduled Run pipeline. This web action posts to the LS Insight telemetry service with information about the LS Insight environment being updated. The primary usage of this is to be able to trigger update of data to LS Forecast and LS Recommend whenever an LS Insight environment connected to the Forecast and Recommend services is updated. But this will also allow us to get information about how many of our customers are running LS Insight and how frequently it is being updated. This will give a better overview of the usage and let us create a better product for our customers.
Reports
LS Insight Sales
We have updated the look and feel of our Sales report template and added several new report pages. The new report template will not work with older versions of LS Insight.
LS Insight Inventory
We have updated the look and feel of our Inventory report template and added several new report pages. The new report template will not work with older versions of LS Insight.
LS Insight Supply Chain
We have added a new Supply chain report template. It contains several pages and a visual that display statistics and analysis for Purchase and Transfer orders. The new report template will not work with older versions of LS Insight.
Note: The Supply Chain report and additions to the data warehouse are only compatible with version of LS Central that have $systemCreatedAt field in each table. The system fields were added to the purchase order tables in LS Central version 15.0. We will look into whether this can be modified in future versions of LS Insight.
Note: We are in the process of testing the new reports and additions to the replication jobs for LS Central SaaS and will release support for the new reports for LS Central SaaS in the next version of LS Insight.
LS Insight Actionable Insights
We have added a new Actionable Insights report template. It contains several pages and a visual that display statistics and analysis for Actionable Insight alerts and notifications. The new report template will not work with older versions of LS Insight. And only for LS Central version 19.5 or later where the Actionable Insight functionality was added.
Note: We are in the process of testing the new reports and additions to the replication jobs for LS Central SaaS and will release support for the new reports for LS Central SaaS in the next version of LS Insight.
LS Insight Hotels
We have updated the look and feel of our Hotels report template.
Bug fixes
Fixed inconsistency between source and sync in All staging tables copy activity - the column SumCountRows in [LSInsight$QUERY BASE] is 0 by default. At the start of each data load the column is updated with the source row count for each staging table. This value is then used to determine if the next run should be incremental or full load.
Instructions for Azure SQL server password were updated since the password cannot contain single quotation marks.
Transactions with date 1753-01-01 should not be added to DW fact tables - Having transactions with this date in the LS Insight data warehouse causes issues in reports, so they become out of memory because all the time intelligence calculations are working from 1753. These transactions are usually some faulty test data and should not be moved to the data warehouse so now they are excluded.