When using tools such as Excel, Crystal Ball or ModelRisk, it is very important to be able to translate a mental model to a mathematical one. Let me illustrate, when you think about your business, you often will think of abstract notions such as profit or margins. These are mental constructs because their are no physical representations of profit or margins (except a pile of cash) only mathematical ones.

If your objective is to feed one simulation with the results of another, VBA is the way to go. Working on a client assignment, we took the results from a first simulation to configure the parameters of the second. Of course VBA is not the only way, their is also the manual approach.

If all your simulations are in the same workbook, one of the first things that you need to manage is how you will isolate your numbers. For this reason I personally like working with straight values rather than formulas. In crystal ball you can auto-extract most parameters (e.g. mean, median, kurtosis, percentiles, etc.)  from a forecast right into your worksheet.

Alternatively, you can use the CB.GetForeData, CB.GetForePercent, CB.GetForeStat formulas to get the information you need from the first simulation and use copy/paste special - values. In either case we are working with values.

What would happen if we used the formulas only? When we would run the second simulation, the parameters would change as the...

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This article provides a highlevel overview of how and why to integrate VBA in Crystal Ball spreadsheet models. Given that Oracle Crystal Ball runs on Excel, it is worth exploring how VBA can create behaviors that are NOT natural to Excel!

For almost 15 years we have been witnessing a fundamental shift in how we do business, how we live and how we envision the world. Some have referred to this as a Paradigm Shift (Senge, 1991) brought on by cheaper and more accessible technologies (Ashkenas et al. 1995). As business people, we are constantly faced with solving problems and driving results, but that task is becoming more difficult because the lay of the land has changed and is going to continue to change – for everybody and every industry. 

The fact that change and the unknown will have a deep impact on decision makers is not new, in fact Sun Tzu noted this almost 2000 years ago in the Art of War 

“We are not fit to lead an army on the march unless we are familiar with the face of the country – its mountains and forests, its pitfalls and precipices, its marshes and swamps.”

Our challenge is to find new ways to understand and model our environment in ways that will provide useful and relevant insight. In this blog we are going...

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