Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is one of the most critical activities that businesses perform. The resulting decisions are far-reaching and greatly impact ultimate successes or failures. The Vanguard System™ gives you confidence that your decisions are the right decisions.

Adding Structure to Chaos

Strategic planning is so difficult because it involves many interdependent facets of a company on top of which is all the uncertainty each brings into play. But Vanguard makes the process of modeling these complex interactions easy due to its sophisticated yet simple interface which enables you to capture expert knowledge from within your company and apply it to your planning efforts. Leveraging your existing company knowledge with our unique combination of Expert System technology and advanced analytical methods gives you the power to grow your company faster and more confidently.

With Vanguard, you are able to build comprehension planning models using the knowledge of expert employees who are spread throughout your organization. In other words, Vanguard frees you from having to rely on the analysis of a single modeler with second-hand knowledge. Instead, Vanguard directly involves key individuals in a collaborative modeling process to create a collective intelligence that is unachievable any other way. This collective intelligence is captured as component models in a reusable knowledge-base, or model library, that grows through continued use.

Vanguard automatically handles all of the intricate complexities of combining models when they are built by people in different countries using different currencies, different time scales, and different update schedules.

Fully-Quantified Impacts

Vanguard fully quantifies the financial and operational impacts of strategic decisions at all levels of an organization. Even when historical data is scarce, Vanguard knows how to interpret your management estimates, assumptions, and uncertainties.

By simulating thousands of real-world scenarios at the same time, Vanguard enables you test your plans in a virtual world where mistakes are inexpensive. You can test all your alternatives and choose the best course of action; try your own what-if scenarios; or, let Vanguard identify your most important risks and opportunities so you know exactly where to focus your attention.

Getting Stakeholder Buy-In

Vanguard also helps you get stakeholder buy-in for strategic initiatives. Using our intuitive and interactive Web reports, stakeholders can review assumptions, explore the analysis, and even perform their own what-if scenarios. Engaged stakeholders who directly contribute to a planning and analysis process are more likely to feel informed, confident, and willing to give their support.

Benefits / Features

• Collaboration: Many individuals simultaneously contribute to a planning effort. Like building blocks, easily combine their knowledge, assumptions, and historical data into models of complex decisions.
• Scalable: A small group or many departments, Vanguard supports strategic planning activities of any size.
• Roll up / Drill down: Roll-up your analysis to see the effects on the enterprise as a whole, or drill down into specific areas of the business for greater detail and understanding.
• Instant Web reports: With a few clicks, Vanguard turns models into interactive Web reports. Access your models anytime from anywhere, fully exercise the models in real time, and distribute your results to everyone who needs them.
• Easy integration: Vanguard integrates directly with your existing business systems such as databases, enterprise applications, and even spreadsheets.
• Version control: Track who made changes to your models and roll-back assumptions to any date and time.
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