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The role Finance Departments are playing in business
is changing. Increasingly, Finance Departments are taking
on the task of applying comprehensive planning and
analysis methods to provide critical support for
enterprise decision-making.
A successful transition to these new responsibilities
requires that Finance Department members are able to:
- Capture business knowledge from individuals who
are spread throughout your organization so that
you can plan effectively;
- Employ sophisticated modeling and simulation
techniques such as quantitative risk analysis and
collaborative forecasting;
- Understand which analysis methods can be used
when historical data is scarce and all that
exists is management estimates, expectations, and
uncertain assumptions. (This is especially
relevant to strategic planning activities.)
- Distribute models and analysis as interactive Web
reports to internal management to help them
"run" the business.
Using Vanguard, you can meet all these requirements;
plus, significantly help to improve overall enterprise
business performance.
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?
Here are just a few ways Vanguard supports Finance
Departments:
- Fully-quantified impacts:
Vanguard fully quantifies the financial and
operational impacts of decisions at all levels of
an organization. Roll-up analysis to see the
high-level enterprise impacts, or drill down into
specific areas of the business for greater detail
and understanding.
- Financial forecasting: Forecast
the financial performance of specific areas of
the business. Then consolidate them into
higher-level forecasts for greater insight. The
intricate complexities of consolidating forecasts
when they are built by people in different
countries using different currencies, different
time scales, etc., are all handled completely
automatically by Vanguard.
- Risk analysis: Vanguard is the
first quantitative risk analysis solution that
leverages the combined power of your company's
collective intelligence and our proven analytical
methods to give you complete risk-based
visibility and insight into your business.
- Project analysis: Vanguard can
help elicit input from the right people, forecast
costs, and properly account for risks during a
project planning phase to ensure your projects
stay on budget and on schedule.
- Capital planning: Create
risk-based budgets for capital-intensive
activities. Make sure cash is available if
operating cash flow is negative and plan for
positive outcomes so idle cash does not reduce
company return on assets (ROA).
- Instant Web reports: With a few
clicks, Vanguard turns financial 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.
Using the Collective Intelligence of Your Enterprise
The knowledge your business needs in order to plan
effectively is divided between individuals who are 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. CMS quickly provides finance departments with automated systems for consistent, routine decision-making and frees them to focus on future initiatives.
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, each
of these Vanguard capabilities is a technological
breakthrough in and of itself. 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.
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