Oracle Crystal Ball has finally released its latest version of its industry leading Monte-Carlo tool. Essentially 3 features were added to the Fusion Edition.

When building models we are often confronted with assumptions that evolve over time. In most cases it is important to capture these changes to keep our model relevant. Over the last decade, Business Intelligence solutions have created a culture of self-service IS information.  Given this democratization and decentralized access to data has created many opportunities and pitfalls for business analysts and decision-makers. We are going to outline some opportunities and pitfalls relating to shared modeling and a few strategies to get started.

This post presents the opportunities and challenges stemming from moving towards a distributed modeling paradigm in the organization. Also presented is a high-level integrated predictive/collaborative planning process.

 A brief review of Oracle and Microsoft database/application integration with Excel and Crystal Ball for comprehensive modeling

 Quick overview of the parts of an optimization model in MS Excel.

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.

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.