Consulting Solutions

The goals of any consulting company are quite simple:

• Produce high-quality analysis, insight, and recommendations; and
• Turn single-project customers into long-term clients.

Accomplishing the first goal requires a combination of expertise and the best modeling and simulation tools available. Accomplishing the second goal is a bit more challenging. While high-quality analysis, insight, and recommendations are certainly part of the process, you need to go above and beyond your client's expectations in your deliverables.

The Vanguard System™ helps consulting companies in every industry profitably accomplish these goals with cutting-edge collaborative modeling capabilities, a unified suite of modeling and simulation methods, and active model delivery over the Web.

Solutions

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 models and applications, Analyze alternatives using state-of-the-art modeling and simulation techniques, Automate routine decisions using expert system technology, and Improve overall management effectiveness of your client 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 clients operate intelligently.

Here are just a few of the ways Vanguard helps consulting companies be more efficient and profitable:

• Flexibility and power: As a unified solution, Vanguard truly enables you to build any analytical model or application that your client needs - including business models that range from simple economic analyses to massive strategic planning simulations, and turn-key applications that range from online forecasting tools to regulatory compliance systems. The sky's the limit.
• Collaborative modeling: Let many individuals simultaneously contribute to the modeling effort to increase expertise while reducing build time. Like building blocks, easily combine their knowledge, assumptions, and historical data into complete models.
• Instant Web applications: With a few clicks, Vanguard turns models into interactive Web applications. Let your clients access the models anytime from anywhere, fully exercise the models in real-time, and distribute the results to everyone that needs them.
• Reusable model library: You do not have to re-invent the wheel with each new modeling effort. Simply search your model library to find similar or related models that you can update, specialize, or link to in real-time.
• Knowledge automation: Create expert systems that guide users through complex processes using automated question-and-answer sessions. Reduce your client's administration costs while improving their productivity.
• Rapid bid preparations: Reduce bid preparation time by reusing components from your previous bids and projects and by automating routine or complex analysis.

Collaborate

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

Vanguard's collaboration abilities go well beyond simple communication strategies like Web conferencing. Instead, Vanguard is based on principles of knowledge capture. Individuals throughout an organization describe to the system how they make decisions or perform particular tasks using our innovative model-based approach. In doing this, users capture knowledge, or know-how, that is specific to their 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.

Analyze

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 your client's future risks and opportunities so that you can help then act rather than react.

Vanguard combines all of the most powerful and essential quantitative methods in management with features of spreadsheets, artificial intelligence tools, and math applications to produce an advanced business modeling system. Vanguard's specific capabilities include:

• Forecasting - for extrapolating historical performance data to aid in planning.
• Monte Carlo Simulation - for modeling uncertainty to help manage business risk and simulate complex systems.
• Decision Tree Analysis - for choosing the best course of action when future outcomes are uncertain.
• Sensitivity Analysis - for determining which assumptions drive your decisions most.
• Optimization - for finding the best solution to very complex problems subject to business constraints.
• General Modeling and Problem Solving - for tackling logically complex problems and communicating your ideas clearly.
• Data Analysis - for pulling valuable information from historical or experimental data.
• Advanced Analytics - for building models that push the envelope in state-of-the-art business analysis.
• Application Development - for building mission-critical applications based on Vanguard.

Vanguard's layered capabilities architecture

Automate

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 client's management team repeat the same analysis monthly, you have people in their team describe how they perform their analysis. In effect, the Vanguard System learns the process and can repeat it for them.

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

Improve

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 alone. Taken together, however, Vanguard sets a new benchmark in management systems. It will improve your client'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. It will improve your productivity by simplifying the modeling process and by encouraging reuse of prior work. By focusing on ways to improve management teams rather than simply analyzing operational data, Vanguard has the potential to transform your client's business.