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Marketing and Sales is one of the most important
corporate departments within an organization because it
most directly drives company revenue and profitability.
Facing high levels of uncertainty, Marketing and Sales
departments must answer difficult questions such as:
- What will global demand be next quarter?
- Will a marketing campaign be successful?
- How will a new product launch affect the existing
demand mix?
- How can we improve customer retention?
- How can we better help customers choose the right
products?
Bringing Together People, Analytics, and Systems
The Vanguard System™ helps Marketing and Sales
departments answer these questions and more. Vanguard 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.
Powerful Forecasting Analytics
Whether you have data warehouses full of historical
data or only your best management estimates, Vanguard
helps you produce the highest quality forecasts possible
using Wizard-style guides and easy-to-assemble models.
Unlike most forecasting tools on the market, Vanguard
combines all three proven forecasting methods
into a single solution, including Time-series
forecasting, Monte Carlo simulation,
and Statistical Regression. This gives
you the power to forecast anything you need - from
traditional product demand to finding the likelihood that
a marketing campaign will increase customer leads by 25%.
Vanguard lets you drill into your forecasts for
greater detail and understanding. And, you can review
forecasts at any roll-up level such as
consolidating across:
- Regions for global views of demand;
- Product lines for raw material forecasts;
- People for team summaries;
- And much more.
Real-time Collaboration
You can produce exceptionally accurate forecasts using
Vanguard by leveraging the collective intelligence
of your entire Marketing and Sales team. Vanguard enables
you to capture the team's knowledge and opinions about
risks, opportunities, events, and uncertainties. All the
intricate complexities of aggregating the forecasts when
they are built by people in different countries using
different currencies, different time scales, different
update schedules, etc., are handled automatically by
Vanguard.
The knowledge you need in order to forecast
effectively is divided between many individuals who are
spread throughout your organization. Vanguard enables you
to capture the knowledge, or know-how, these key
individuals possess that is specific to their business
activities.This allows for a collaborative planning
process that spans the entire enterprise.
When such activities are performed in isolation,
company performance can suffer. To generate the most
cost-effective and accurate business plans, real-time
collaboration with other areas of the enterprise must
occur. Collaborative planning can impact every aspect of
an enterprise such as:
- Marketing plans that detail how to target
customers;
- Sales plans that forecast customer demand and
revenues;
- Financial plans that project Profit & Loss
(P&L) and Balance Sheet performance;
- Operational plans that schedule when and what to
produce; and
- R&D plans that map out next-generation
products and services.
Without real-time collaboration, information quickly
becomes static, detail gets lost in translation from
group to group, and stakeholders lose confidence in the
analysis. The result is increased enterprise risk,
business inefficiency, and uninformed decision-making.
Optimal Mix / Portfolio Analysis
Using a combination of intuitive modeling and
simulation methods, Vanguard helps optimize product and
service portfolios by fully quantifying their financial
and operational impacts at all levels of the enterprise.
Vanguard simulates thousands of real-world scenarios at
the same time and identifies your most important
portfolio risks and opportunities. You learn exactly
where to focus your attention, how to balance good risk
with unavoidable risk, and how to configure your best
portfolio.
Efficient Market and Customer Research
You must know your market in order to gain traction.
You must understand your customers in order to satisfy
them. Vanguard Vista™ allows you to create, post,
track, and analyze surveys online for in-depth yet
cost-effective market and customer research. Vista's
results analysis is unmatched by any online survey tool.
From confidence intervals to an exhaustive correlation
analysis, Vista handles the statistics for you
automatically and presents them in print-ready summary
reports.
Salesforce Automation
Using knowledge automation techniques, Vanguard
improves sales productivity while reducing administrative
costs:
- Expertly guide users or customers through complex
sales decisions by reducing the process to
intuitive question-and-answer sessions;
- Maximize sales conversions with Vanguard's online
product selectors by quickly directing customers
to the best-fitting products; or,
- Turn every sales agent into an expert with
Vanguard's Web-based scripts that efficiently
help close even the most complicated of sales.
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