Are you confident of the risks you face in your business and strategic planning?

• Can you deliver a forecast on the probability that customers will accept changes in service?
• Are you able to confidently forecast the demand for, and potential profits of, new products?
• Can you create graphs and charts that quantify the risks associated with mergers and acquisitions?
• Can you pinpoint the key variables that affect the success of an expansion into new markets?

When your management and colleagues want to understand the risks of your business decisions, what do you tell them?

Whether you're analyzing customer needs to align them with product offerings, creating a business case, determining pricing sensitivity, forecasting demand in competitive markets, modeling call handling for a phone center, or valuing financial options, you need to account for the known uncertainty in your models. To ignore the effects of uncertainty means to potentially expose your organization to unnecessary risk and potential failure. Not to mention your own prospects!

Crystal Ball is a Microsoft® Excel®-based suite of analytical tools that includes Monte Carlo simulation, optimization, and forecasting. With little effort, you can apply these advanced analytical techniques to your new or existing spreadsheets to create more accurate cost and financial predictions and better informed business decisions.

Crystal Ball software is for anyone who uses spreadsheets and needs to forecast uncertain results. Financial analysts, marketers, product managers, and engineers all rely on Crystal Ball to improve the quality of their decision making processes (see our list of common applications below).

Today, Crystal Ball is the tool chosen by top telecommunications companies and more than 85% of the Fortune 500. Companies such as Sprint, Qwest, and Nortel rely on Crystal Ball to manage risk and make more informed business decisions.

With Crystal Ball, you can:

• Replace min/max estimates with more accurate range of all possible outcomes
• Reduce the time required to produce forecasts,
• Eliminate multiple manual “what if” estimates,
• Mitigate your cost and schedule risks,
• Gain immediate insight to the inputs that drive uncertainty and most effect failure and success,
• Make knowledgeable decisions on where to focus resources, and
• Provide decision-makers with factual data that shows the risk associated with each choice.

Key features of interest to your industry include sensitivity analysis, correlation, and historical data fitting. The sensitivity analysis helps you to understand which of the uncertain input variables are most critical and drive the uncertainty of your cost model. Correlation lets you link uncertain inputs and account for their positive or negative dependencies. If historical data does exist, the data fitting feature will compare the data to the distribution algorithms and calculate the best possible fit and parameters for your data.

LEARN MORE ABOUT CRYSTAL BALL FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS

This page offers links to a growing number of resources, including recorded Web seminars, articles, white papers, case studies, and example models. Additionally, you can view a list of common uses and examples reported directly from customers using Crystal Ball. You can also download a free trial version of Crystal Ball to see how it can help improve your business forecasts and decisions!

RECORDED WEB SEMINARS

Look for listings in the near future.

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WHITE PAPERS & ARTICLES

Enhancing the Telecommunications Decision Support Process By Chad Lander & Jay Harrison	Download
How to Combine Forecasts and Risk Analysis to Bring Together Disparate Business Units By Paul Twenter	Download
Price Optimisation By Using Business Risk Analysis and Game Theory By Dr. István Fekete, Business Services Line of Business Matáv Rt., (Hungarian Telecommunications Co. Ltd.)	Download
Telecommunications Network Evolution Decisions: Using Crystal Ball and OptQuest for Real Options Valuation By John M. Charnes, Barry R. Cobb, The University of Kansas School of Business	Download

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CASE STUDIES

Sprint on Real Options in Telecommunications	Download
Interpreting Market Demands France Telecom Calls on Crystal Ball to Interpret Market Demands	Download
Designing Portable Products Motorola Labs Engineers Apply Crystal Ball Pro to Improve the Design of Portable Products	Download
Provisioning Customers Sprint Calls on Crystal Ball to Properly Provision Customers	Download

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EXAMPLE MODELS

Call Center Volume From: Created by Ray Covert, rpcovert@yahoo.com Detail: This spreadsheet model calculates the predicted over capacity and under capacity of a call center. The model is applicable to any problem approximating a queuing theory service problem such as bank teller lines, web site bandwidth, and help desk capacity. By calculating the percentiles during days of the week and time blocks during the day, the model shows where the number of calls exceeds the capacity of the staff to service the calls or where the call center is overstaffed.	Download For: Crystal Ball Level: Simple-moderate
Network Simulation From: Mark Cronshaw, Management Science Applications group, AT&T Labs-Broadband, Westminster, CO, mbcronshaw@broadband.att.com . Detail: AT&T Broadband is a company providing video, high speed Internet and telephony services. Network capacity planning is an important issue as we introduce new services. Demand for new services is highly variable. Crystal Ball can be used to model the impact of variable demand on a network.	Download For: Crystal Ball Level: Simple
Product Forecasting - Interactive TV Sales Detail: This model examines a product marketing and forecasting analysis of an emerging media product, Interactive TV (ITV). Colorado Cable has created a discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis that examines the success of the product over a six-year period. Monte Carlo simulation and time-series forecasting are used to provide a greater understanding and quantification of the risks inherent in a spreadsheet-based business forecast..	Download For: Crystal Ball & CB Predictor Level: Simple

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COMMON USES & EXAMPLES

The following examples were provided by our customers and represent only some of the potential telecommunications applications for Crystal Ball.

• Analyzing customer needs to align them with product offerings
• Analyzing queuing patterns for digital telecom network
• Business case analysis for new and existing products and services: Product line analysis, sales target analysis, rate development analysis, product bundle analysis, contribution margin analysis
• Cost and time estimates
• Design for Six Sigma Analysis
• Determining pricing sensitivity
• Developing Financial Forecasts
• Evaluating the fair value of outsourced contracts
• Financial analysis of other alternative management actions for the parent, subsidiary, or consolidated company
• Forecasting demand in competitive markets
• Long Range Forecast modeling and analysis
• Modeling call handling for a phone center
• Monte Carlo simulation on communications systems models
• Negotiating contract pricing
• New business analysis, decisions and operational budgetary analysis, decisions
• Operational management analysis and analysis of operational alternatives
• Project risk management
• Projecting market growth and customer acquisition data
• Quality engineering
• Reducing the risks in strategic business planning
• Sensitivity analysis of projected public benefits of a proposed wireless broadband system -- analysis to be filed with the FCC
• Service quality metrics
• Service uptake forecasting
• Six Sigma
• Strategic analysis
• Tolerance analysis on fiber optic models
• Value various financial options involving securities
  

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