Consulting

The goals of any internal consulting group 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 internal consulting group in every industry profitably accomplish these goals with cutting-edge collaborative modeling capabilities, a unified suite of modeling and simulation tools, and active model delivery over the Web.

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 of the ways Vanguard helps internal consulting groups be more efficient and gain recognition within their company:

• 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.
• Instant Web applications: With a few clicks, Vanguard turns your business 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.
• Fully quantified impacts: Vanguard fully quantifies the financial and operational impacts of decisions at all levels of the 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Knowledge automation: Create expert systems that guide users through complex processes using interactive and intuitive question-and-answer sessions. Reduce your client's administration costs while improving their productivity.
• More...

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.

The new Content Management System (CMS) is a Web-based knowledge automation 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 assists consulting groups in providing consistent recommendations by enabling them to automate decision-making processes quickly, regardless of their programming experience.

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.