Tag: forecasting

Quantrix Offers Collaborative Environment for Essla International

Essla International is a Quantrix partner, and recently started using the business modeling solution to help its clients with budgeting and financial forecasting. At the 2014 Seminar by the Sea, Ernesto Seijas took some time to share his experiences using Quantrix.

The company had several criteria in mind when it was looking for a new software solution, including connectivity to databases, the ability to manage a lot of data, and multidimensional views and found Quantrix to be the best solution.

In addition to meeting everything on the company’s wish list, Quantrix offered a more collaborative environment. “We can have 20, 30, 50 users inputting data – that’s a major difference,” says Seijas. Other benefits include the speed of calculation and reporting.

Seijas also likes Quantrix’s graphical canvas, as it enables him to display what-if scenarios in a dynamic presentation. This capability enhances the impact of Essla’s work, particularly when sharing with management or company boards.

“Quantrix has the best of many of the software [packages] in the market,” says Seijas. “You have the multidimensional approach. You have the data gathering and databases. And you have the reporting and the [fast] calculations.”

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Scenario Planning and Quantrix Modeler

Talking about scenario planning is tricky as it means so many different things in different companies. In many cases, the need for strategic scenario planning is prompted by big changes or potential future changes in the economic environment within which an organization operates. These changes may be due to new competitors and technologies, regulatory constraints, fluctuating commodity prices or funding priorities in the public sector.

In such periods of major change, when the final outcome and effect of the changes are uncertain, the more common methods of forecasting and planning break down, because:

a. historical trends and rates are much less reliable as the basis of forecasting
b. there is so much uncertainty that no one set of assumptions is going to be a certain enough basis on which to plan
c. The organization’s plans need to anticipate a wide range of alternative feasible future circumstances, to ensure that it is not blind-sided by events and can survive and prosper, irrespective of the final circumstances

For some organizations and industries, such conditions only occur at certain times in their lives, so much of the time they may not really need scenario planning and can plan on historic trends and rates and use a bit of “what-iffing” in their budgets and 3 year plans. In other industries, for example in Oil&Gas and Telecomms, the huge impact and unpredictability of oil price in one case and competitors’ technological innovations in the other, mean that these companies should probably benefit from doing full scenario-based planning routinely.

The value of Quantrix Modeler within scenario-based planning is due to its ability to easily vary driver/assumption values, but also because structural changes, that may be anticipated by different scenarios, are also so much easier to make than with spreadsheet models.

John Taylor
Founder
Planning Models Ltd.
http://www.planningmodels.co.uk/