Harvey Jones secures distribution rights to Crystal Ball

Harvey Jones Systems has extended its range of business analytic products and solutions on offer in sub-Saharan Africa, with the recent signing of a distribution agreement with US-based Decisioneering, Inc, that sees Harvey Jones introduce Crystal Ball into the country.

Eighty-five percent of the Fortune 500 companies and more than 350 universities around the world currently use Crystal Ball, a Microsoft Excel-based application that extends the use of spreadsheets to undertake risk assessment, forecasting, optimisation analysis, options analysis and the creation of predictive models.

"Excel is still an end-user tool of choice for most planning and modelling activities," says Yolanda Stimie, product manager at Harvey Jones. "Crystal Ball extends and enhances the spreadsheet environment and is an excellent fit with our current solution set, giving end-users the ability to create, control and visualise complex business models with relative ease. Organisations can analyse historical trends using ProClarity; real-time and operational planning, modelling and multiplatform writeback can be done with ProClarity Live Server; and scenarios and complex modelling can be done using Crystal Ball."

Using Crystal Ball, companies can automate "what if" analysis in the Excel environment, quickly assign ranges of values to inputs, and automatically calculate thousands of different outputs. Results can be recorded for in-depth analysis or summarised with Crystal Ball`s report and chart creation tools.

Crystal Ball is available in Standard, Professional and Premium editions. Crystal Ball Professional Edition provides advanced capabilities to search for optimal solutions with the OptQuest tool and to create accurate predictive models with the CB Predictor tool; while Crystal Ball Premium Edition includes all the features in the professional edition as well as the ability to do real options analysis, a multimedia training CD and two comprehensive textbooks.

"Crystal Ball is the easiest way to perform simulations in the spreadsheet environment," says Alan Perkin, senior account manager in Decisioneering`s UK office. "Using Crystal Ball, analyses of scenarios reveal a range of possible outcomes, their probability of occurring, which input has the most effect on the model, and where efforts should be focused."

With the release of Crystal Ball 7.1, users can add scalable methods for collaborating and sharing models and data; and communicate findings to the relevant managers using graphs, charts and reports.

The Risk Analysis Using Crystal Ball multimedia training CD provides a modular course that can be easily navigated and completed at the individual`s pace, Perkin says. It includes software tips, application ideas, periodic tests and exercises.

Detailing features of the product, Stimie adds: "A new charting engine in the latest release of Crystal Ball delivers presentation-quality charts and reports that support 3D views and right-click menus. A new assumption chart interface allows users to add marker lines to track specific values or statistics, and graphically view the generated random numbers. The randomly generated assumption values are then saved automatically as a run preference."

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Other features include:

- The ability to fit distributions to forecasts during simulation.

- Expanded forecast preferences for the forecast window, precision filter and auto-extract.

- A distribution gallery dialogue that uses an Outlook-like interface for grouping distributions into folders or categories.

- User-defined categories and distributions that can be populated directly from the Define Assumption dialogue.

- An auto-extract feature that writes selected forecast information and statistics to an Excel worksheet after simulation.

- An enhanced data picker for adding assumptions, and correlating assumptions across worksheets.

- Monte Carlo simulations.