Finance

The role Finance Departments are playing in business is changing. Increasingly, Finance Departments are taking on the task of applying comprehensive planning and analysis methods to provide critical support for enterprise decision-making.

A successful transition to these new responsibilities requires that Finance Department members are able to:

• Capture business knowledge from individuals who are spread throughout your organization so that you can plan effectively;
• Employ sophisticated modeling and simulation techniques such as quantitative risk analysis and collaborative forecasting;
• Understand which analysis methods can be used when historical data is scarce and all that exists is management estimates, expectations, and uncertain assumptions. (This is especially relevant to strategic planning activities.)
• Distribute models and analysis as interactive Web reports to internal management to help them "run" the business.

Using Vanguard, you can meet all these requirements; plus, significantly help to improve overall enterprise business performance.

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 ways Vanguard supports Finance Departments:

• Fully-quantified impacts: Vanguard fully quantifies the financial and operational impacts of decisions at all levels of an 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.
• Financial forecasting: Forecast the financial performance of specific areas of the business. Then consolidate them into higher-level forecasts for greater insight. The intricate complexities of consolidating forecasts when they are built by people in different countries using different currencies, different time scales, etc., are all handled completely automatically by Vanguard.
• Risk analysis: Vanguard is the first quantitative risk analysis solution that leverages the combined power of your company's collective intelligence and our proven analytical methods to give you complete risk-based visibility and insight into your business.
• Project analysis: Vanguard can help elicit input from the right people, forecast costs, and properly account for risks during a project planning phase to ensure your projects stay on budget and on schedule.
• Capital planning: Create risk-based budgets for capital-intensive activities. Make sure cash is available if operating cash flow is negative and plan for positive outcomes so idle cash does not reduce company return on assets (ROA).
• Instant Web reports: With a few clicks, Vanguard turns financial models into fully interactive Web reports. Using just a Web browser, access models anytime from anywhere, exercise the models in real time, and distribute results to everyone who needs them.

Using the Collective Intelligence of Your Enterprise

The knowledge your business needs in order to plan effectively is divided between individuals who are spread throughout your organization. The Vanguard System frees you from having to rely on the analysis of a single planner with second-hand knowledge of critical operations. Instead, it enables you to directly involve key individuals in a collaborative planning process.

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

Forward Vision - Acting vs. Reacting

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 future risks and opportunities so that you can act rather than react.

There are a number of business modeling tools available on the market. What's unique about Vanguard is that it does modeling on an Enterprise scale. From the ability to coordinate the work of hundreds of individuals to the ability to run simulations at 1,500 times the speed of spreadsheets, the Vanguard System's power is unmatched.

Productivity Through Knowledge Automation

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 management team repeat the same analysis monthly, you have people in the team describe how they perform their analysis to Vanguard. And, in effect, the Vanguard System learns the process and can repeat it for you.

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

Business Improvement in the Intelligent Enterprise

Whether it is knowledge-based collaboration, simulations at 1,500 times the speed of spreadsheets, or advanced Expert Systems technology, each of these Vanguard capabilities is a technological breakthrough in and of itself. However, taken together, Vanguard sets a new benchmark in management systems.

It will improve your company'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.

And, it will improve your productivity by simplifying the modeling process and encouraging reuse of prior work.

Vanguard has the potential to transform your business by improving management team decisions rather than simply analyzing operational data.