Executive Management Solutions

As an Executive Manager your job is the "big picture"; making sure that, at every decision, you have strategic insight into:

• Corporate performance;
• Profitability and financial stability;
• Enterprise risk;
• Shareholder value;
• Etc.

You can’t rely on "gut feel" alone. Strategic decisions require analysis that quantifies the financial and operational impacts of decision alternatives at all levels of the enterprise. In today’s marketplace, your decisions need to be robust to withstand changing business conditions; and, your analysis must fully capture risks, uncertainties, and the complicated interactions between different areas of the business. Plus, given the pressures and constraints you face, the analysis you need has to be open and transparent, giving you at-a-glance understanding so that you can quickly review assumptions, run your own what-if analysis, and gain immediate insight.

Fortunately, you can have all of these qualities and features in one sophisticated yet easy-to-use solution - the Vanguard System™.

Bringing Together People, Analytics, and Systems

The Vanguard System™ is a comprehensive business solution for improving the quality, reliability, and speed of management decisions. It does this by helping you Collaborate with colleagues on important plans, Analyze alternatives using state-of-the-art modeling and simulation techniques, Automate routine decisions using Expert System technology, and Improve overall management effectiveness by adding structure to a normally chaotic process.

Business improvement is all about working smarter. Vanguard brings together the people, analytics, and systems required to help your business operate intelligently.

What Can Vanguard Do For You?

• Instant Web reports: With a few clicks, Vanguard turns planning and analysis models into fully interactive Web reports. Using just a Web browser, access models anytime from anywhere, exercise the models in real time, and distribute results to everyone who needs them.
• Fully-quantified impacts: Vanguard fully quantifies the financial and operational impacts of decisions at all levels of an organization.
• Real-time results: Make decisions based on the most up-to-date results. Vanguard automatically updates your analysis in real time to reflect changes in assumptions.
• Roll up / Drill down Analysis: Roll-up analysis to see the high-level enterprise impacts, or drill down into specific areas of the business for greater detail and understanding.
• Knowledge capture: Vanguard captures and combines the knowledge of individuals throughout your organization to create a Collective Intelligence that is essential for testing business plans and automating routine operations.
• Scalable: Involving a small group, many departments, or the entire enterprise, Vanguard supports planning and analysis and knowledge automation activities of any size.

Using the Collective Intelligence of Your Enterprise

The knowledge your business needs in order to plan effectively is divided between individuals spread throughout your organization. The Vanguard System frees you from having to rely on the analysis of a single planner with second-hand knowledge of critical operations. Instead, it enables you to directly involve key individuals in a collaborative planning process.

Vanguard's collaboration abilities go well beyond simple communication strategies like Web conferencing. Rather, Vanguard is based on principles of knowledge capture. Individuals throughout your organization use our innovative model-based approach to describe to Vanguard how they make decisions or perform particular tasks. In doing this, users capture knowledge, or know-how, that is specific to your business. The Vanguard System can combine the knowledge captured by many individuals to create a Collective Intelligence that is useful for testing business plans and automating routine operations.

Vanguard Content Management System (CMS) is a Web-based knowledge capture development tool for non-programmers. CMS Web-based applications guide customers or employees through complex decision-making processes using interactive, automated question and answer sessions. They are core software applications that can improve the operational efficiency of your key business processes.

Forward Vision - Acting vs. Reacting

Vanguard's powerful modeling and simulation technology allows you to test business alternatives in a virtual world where mistakes are inexpensive. Instead of helping you know only what has happened, Vanguard will help you understand why. What's more, Vanguard can help you anticipate future risks and opportunities so that you can act rather than react.

There are a number of business modeling tools available on the market. What's unique about Vanguard is that it does modeling on an Enterprise scale. From the ability to coordinate the work of hundreds of individuals to the ability to run simulations at 1,500 times the speed of spreadsheets, the Vanguard System's power is unmatched.

Productivity Through Knowledge Automation

Many management processes were once considered too complex or too fluid to automate. As a result, routine business planning at most companies involves copying and pasting data between spreadsheets, re-building old models, and a significant amount of gut-feel decision-making. Although this process can work, it is very inefficient and expensive.

Vanguard improves the speed, reliability, and quality of routine decisions by combining its business modeling capabilities with Expert System technology. Instead of having your management team repeat the same analysis monthly, you have people in the team describe how they perform their analysis to Vanguard. And, in effect, the Vanguard System learns the process and can repeat it for you.

You get business automation via an easy-to-use Web interface without the need for an expensive IT development.

Business Improvement in the Intelligent Enterprise

Whether it is knowledge-based collaboration, simulations at 1,500 times the speed of spreadsheets, or advanced Expert Systems technology, many of Vanguard's capabilities are technological breakthroughs in and of themselves. However, taken together, Vanguard sets a new benchmark in management systems.

It will improve your company's decision-making by improving the analysis on which these decisions are based.

It will improve the quality of your analysis by encouraging collaboration and the application of state-of-the-art techniques.

And, it will improve your productivity by simplifying the modeling process and encouraging reuse of prior work.

Vanguard has the potential to transform your business by improving management team decisions rather than simply analyzing operational data.