Business Analytics Suite
The Vanguard Business Analytics Suite
is designed for professional business modelers. It offers
the greatest level of analytics capability among our
single-user, desktop applications by including the
following Vanguard System™ components in a single
application:
If you have a number of people who work together in
building business models, you should also consider the Vanguard System Server.
To compare the functionality of the Business Analytics
Suite to that of other Suites, refer to the Product Comparison Chart.
From Data to Decisions
By adding Optimization to Forecasting
and Simulation capabilities, the
Business Analytics Suite gives you a level of capability
that is unmatched in any software. The primary reason for
building a forecast model is to allow you to test
competing business plans and chose the best one. However,
this can involve a significant amount of manual what-if
analysis. Using the Stochastic Optimizer,
the Business Analytics Suite can automatically exercise
your forecast models to find the best business plan. This
will allow you to find solutions that are often
impossible to find with any other application.
Enterprise-scale Capacity
The Business Analytics Suite (and the Vanguard System
in general) gives you the ability to build
enterprise-scale models. Spreadsheets, the most popular
tool for business planning, are suitable for basic
business modeling, but suffers from an inability to scale
efficiently as your models grow in complexity. If you
have ever tried to build a very complex spreadsheet
model, you will appreciate how the difficulty of managing
the model grows exponentially with the model size. At
some point, you hit the Wall--a point at which
it is no longer practical to improve or maintain the
model.
The Vanguard System uses hierarchy,
object-oriented modeling principals, and
a rich graphical interface to make it
possible for models to grow without the exponential
explosion in complexity. The result is that models are
much easier to build, maintain, and keep free of errors.
The architecture for building massive
models is only one of the key requirements for
enterprise-scale modeling. Moving from a simple,
point-forecast model to a Monte Carlo simulation
increases the computational complexity 1,000 times.
Spreadsheets can handle moderately-sized Monte Carlo
simulations, but this is the limit of their capabilities.
The good stuff begins when you move to Portfolio
Modeling, where the computational complexity is 10,000
times that of a point forecast, and when you move to
Optimization, where the complexity can increase to
100,000,000 times that of a point forecast.
To handle massively complex models,
Vanguard supports Grid computing. Using an inexpensive
network of existing computers, you can put true
supercomputing power on your desktop and handle problems
of almost limitless size. Vanguard is the only commercial
software that has this capability.
More Information
Since the Business Analytics Suite is built on the
Vanguard System platform, you can get more information
about its capabilities by reading about the Vanguard System Server or
by referring to the following system component pages:
|
