Simplicity Is Golden

It's not all fun and games in the amusement-park business.

Just ask Gary Neveras. As senior director of financial planning analysis at Universal Orlando, Neveras is responsible for tracking and forecasting the numbers on more than 1,000 different ventures and projects at the theme park. "We have tons of information," he says. "But being able to mine that information and make business decisions — that's a challenge."

Like financial managers at a lot of other businesses, Neveras uses software to foretell an array of financial trends. And like financial managers at a lot of other businesses, he cringes at the effort needed to use the software. "Many modeling products just don't offer a good mix of usability and flexibility," he says.

You get that a lot. While makers of planning applications have come a long way with their products, they've tended to overlook one small item: most users of computer programming aren't, in fact, computer programmers. Says John Hagerty, a financial software analyst at AMR Research, a technology market research firm in Boston: "The focus so far has primarily been on providing products that deliver the most analytical power."

That's understandable. Given the competition in the budgeting-and-planning software sector, B&P vendors have had little choice but to trick out their programs with all sorts of bells and whistles. But after prodding from customers — many of which rely on entry-level workers to input data into modeling programs — most vendors are at least beginning to address the issue of usability. In fact, upstarts like Quantrix and KCI Computing Inc. are flogging ease of use as a major selling point for their products. And such established vendors as Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, and Geac Computer are attempting to design modeling apps that are simpler and more straightforward. Says Lee Geishecker, a corporate performance management analyst at Gartner Inc., a technology research firm in Stamford, Connecticut: "They've all become quite sensitive about usability."

Cell Hell
Of course, the most popular modeling software in the business galaxy hardly qualifies as user-friendly. While Microsoft Excel does provide a formidable amount of analytical muscle, the advantage tends to fade as models grow more complex. That's particularly frustrating for power users.

In fact, the well-documented limitations of Excel have opened a selling opportunity for rival vendors, eager to nick their share of what's estimated to be a $4 billion industry. "Excel is a technology that's designed to meet the needs of the lowest common denominator," argues Chris Houle, chief operating officer and co-founder of Quantrix, the Portland, Maine-based financial modeling software developer.

Quantrix's flagship product is Quantrix Modeler, an application that aims to be simple to use and easy for others to understand. "With Excel, you find spreadsheet models become so complex and convoluted that it is difficult to zero in on the specific or relevant elements of a model," says Houle. Quantrix Modeler attempts to address this problem by providing a variety of user-geared features, including plain-English formulas that make models easier to comprehend, trace, and audit. The result, insists Houle, is a structured, multidimensional modeling application offering advanced data-integration capabilities.

Bryan Babineau of software developer Citrix Systems Inc. uses the Quantrix application to build revenue models. Babineau, financial-planning manager for the online division of the Fort Lauderdale-based company, says he likes how the program separates the presentation of a model from its logic and structure. "In Excel, we had to painstakingly lock certain cells to make sure that people didn't accidentally change the formulas or type over them," he says. With Quantrix, Babineau says, formulas are stored in a separate sheet that's kept away from a user.

Isolating formulas from a spreadsheet's data and presentation elements (and having the formulas represented in plain English) is a big advance. It's one that's certain to be appreciated by employees who don't spend all day revising pivot tables for a possible .2 percent projected decrease in gross sales in Orange County (northwest sector). Some vendors, on the other hand, are hawking planning products that actually mimic the oft-cursed Excel.

KCI Control, for one, provides an Excel-like syntax that allows users to leverage their prior experience with the Microsoft product to create models. "We have worked extremely hard to put Control in a familiar and understandable form that financial analysts, planners, and end users know and love, which is the Excel environment," says Max Kay, CEO at Torrance, California-based KCI. Formulas in the program are defined using a point-and-click wizard.

While KCI Control is designed to satisfy sophisticated users, it also considers the novice. The program has one common database to ensure the integrity of the plan and the conclusions derived from it, together with a security layer, which shields less-experienced or careless users from accidentally corrupting existing models. By layering the functionality of the software, workers see only as much of the product as they need to.

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