Ask "What If" Questions. Do you ask "What If" questions about the future of your business? Do you get accurate answers? Do you get answers when you want them? Are you at the mercy of a technical analyst? Do you know where the answers come from when you do get them? The Planners Lab software provides answers when you want them based upon your questions.

Do Goal Seeking. Do you ever ask, "How can I?" The Planners Lab Goal Seek function easily answers such questions. Just pick a variable for which you want to find a desired outcome. Then pick what you want to change to achieve the outcome. Then watch the animated movements on visual images that answer your questions. It’s just that simple! You can’t do that mining historical databases.

"Play" with Assumptions Do you prefer visually-appealing, simple and meaningful charts rather than table after table of numbers? Who wouldn’t? With the Planners Lab you use drag-and-drop to easily "play" with the assumptions in real time and on the fly – immediately revealing the consequences of the changes.

See What Matters Most. Do you know which variables in your business have the greatest impact upon performance? What really matters? What demands careful attention? The Planners Lab let’s you instantly see, learn and find the answers to these questions – and more.

Discover and Learn Is learning a primary benefit of applications software? Yes – and that is truly the case with the Planners Lab. It allows you to personally interact with data to quickly discover and learn what was previously unknown. This helps to avoid costly surprises caused by programming errors and misunderstandings.

Create Your Own Models in Plain English. What’s unique about the Planners Lab model building process? A Planners Lab model is built by you in plain English – or German, Spanish, French, etc. Decision makers actively participate in creating the assumptions that generate the numbers. No need to memorize a manual.

Surface Assumptions. What are "assumptions?" Assumptions are the logical underpinnings to explain or describe how a business functions. Example assumptions are Growth Rate = 20 percent for the first two years and then flattens at 18 percent; Price = $22 in the first quarter and then grows at 5 percent per year; etc. You need assumptions to build a model and you need a model to answer "What If" questions. These assumptions, invisible in most decision-making processes, are often more important than the output numbers themselves.

Explore Various Sources of Data. Where does the data come from that is seen in Planners Lab charts? It comes from the simulation models which you build with the Planners Lab software. Data that is input to drive the model comes from a variety of sources - opinions, experience, intuition, market research, Excel, SQL and other databases, polls, magazines, TV, colleagues – wherever data is normally obtained.

Measure Risks. How do you quantify risk? Often it is simply ignored in the hope that it will go away. Sometimes, decision makers consider worst case scenarios. Regardless, risk is always present. With the Planners Lab, risk assumptions are easily incorporated as part of the model. Would you like quick answers to questions like, "What are the chances of breaking even in the fourth quarter?" The Planners Lab provides them.

Communicate and Collaborate. With the Planners Lab software at the center of the problem solving process, issues such as team communication and collaboration, different viewpoints and different assumptions are quickly surfaced and resolved. The Planners Lab serves as a friendly, non-obtrusive and unbiased "facilitator."

Be a Model Builder an Executive Viewer or Both. The Workgroup version provides complete Planners Lab functionality. This version follows the Macromedia philosophy of occasionally connected. The Viewer version is for visualizing results and asking "What If" questions via a Web browser. Model building is not available in this version.

Create Living Dashboards. Dashboards have been around since the mid 1980s and have again become fashionable. Still, they only contain presentations of static historical (database) data. In contrast, with the Planner's Lab you can create "living dashboards" with "live data." When assumptions are changed, you receive immediate visualization of how the changes affect your other assumptions and the results.