Intuitive Visual Modeling

Intuitive influence diagrams let you create a model the way you think, and communicate clearly with colleagues and clients.

Multidimensional Calculation

Multi-dimensional Calculation

Intelligent Arrays™ let you create and manage tables with many dimensions with an ease and reliability not possible in Excel.

Monte Carlo Simulation

Efficient Monte Carlo simulation lets you quickly evaluate risk and uncertainty, and find out what variables really matter and why.

Influence Diagrams

Escape the cell: Build your models the way you think.

An Analytica model is organized as a hierarchy of influence diagrams. They show you the big picture and let you build and navigate your model visually. Think of this as an interactive whiteboard—but with all the details, calculations, and numbers underneath.

Instant access to every element in your model

Drill down, up or sideways. Analytica’s influence diagrams are your model’s visual roadmap. With a hierarchy of nested modules, you always know where you are and can quickly move to any desired level or module.

Build, navigate, present and explain your model’s structure with speed and confidence. Never again hunt down and decipher arcane row-and-column coordinates or formulas. Dispense with building separate summary models and reports in order to present and support your results. Your Analytica model is all you need.

Influence Diagrams are a breakthrough way to build models. And Analytica modelers love them.

“With a little practice, you can link elements to build a model almost as fast as you can think.”
—MacWorld
“An Analytica diagram is worth a thousand spreadsheet cells.”
—Rich Brenner, The Brenner Group LLC
“My sincere congratulations for the development of a very fine program. I really like it. It is very easy to use when setting up models and especially in modifying them.”
—Naval Postgraduate School
“Analytica is very easy to learn. ... Once the software has been learned, it is delightful to use. The number of mouse-clicks and key strokes required to produce desired results is minimal, yet the process to follow is obvious.”
—Cox & Associates
“Analytica makes an excellent replacement for a spreadsheet since models can be constructed directly from relationships without being constrained by the row and column paradigm of a spreadsheet.”
—David Neiger, Australian Engineer magazine
“I estimate that the time I spend writing Analytica models is one quarter to one half of that devoted to similarly complex spreadsheets.”
—ORMS Today

Intelligent Arrays™

Don’t repeat yourself: Let Analytica worry about rows and columns.

A formula for calculating “Revenues” should simply read like this, right? And so it does in Analytica. How does it work?
Of course, each variable could be just a single number. That’s how it works in an ordinary spreadsheet like Excel.
But suppose that each variable, like Quantity in this case, could be broken down by Product and Region.
Then this variable is basically a two-dimensional table, indexed by Product and Region--and no longer a single number. 
Typically, other variables, like Price in this case, are also indexed by one or more of the same dimensions.
In practice, variables can be multi-dimensional “tables” sharing the same dimensions--or some of.
It might even be that some variables are indexed by different dimensions. Here the Change variable is indexed by Year.
Now, instead of simple numbers we have tables or arrays of numbers with various dimensions that ought to be multiplied.
In Analytica, the multiplication of these variables results in a multidimensional table--or a “cube” if you like.
Analytica automatically combines the corresponding indexes in the right way, generating a multidimensional table. 
So, as long as a formula is valid regardless of the dimensionality of the variables, it is as simple as that!
An that’s how it looks like in Analytica. “Revenues” contains this simple formula--or Definition in Analytica speech:
This way, formulas in Analytica are quick and easy to write--and easy to read and understand, too.
Analytica automatically keeps track of the dimensions of each variable and displays them to aid scrutiny and review. 
This technology is called Intelligent Arrays™, and it makes even more useful things possible...
For example, when you edit or expand one dimension, this change is automatically propagated through the model...
...updating every affected input or result table--without touching any formula at all. Compare this to Excel...

Although the influence diagram appears as simple, it scales up to handle complex, multidimensional problems—effortlessly. Don’t worry about the rows-and-columns layout of your model. You create, change, or extent dimension, and Analytica cares about the rest.

Expand your models with Intelligent Arrays™

Forget about the rows-and-column restriction of Excel. Analytica’s proprietary Intelligent Arrays™ provide the power to scale up your models to handle multidimensional problems with ease—for instance, sales over many time periods, products, and regions, as a function of alternative prices and marketing budgets. Each dimension becomes a simple index.

  • Write and store each formula only once, not one for each cell in a table.
  • Choose the most meaningful views in tables and graphs by interchanging rows, columns, and higher dimensions.
  • Extend existing dimensions or add new ones—the model expands automatically without the manual work required with Excel.
  • Reduce the time and effort to build, verify, and audit large models at an order of magnitude.

Many Analytica users believe that Intelligent Arrays™ is what makes Analytica most valuable.

“Analytica is like a multidimensional spreadsheet, only much friendlier.”
—Robert Brown, Partner, Decision Strategies, Inc.
“My sincere congratulations for the development of a very fine program. I really like it. It is very easy to use when setting up models and especially in modifying them.”
—Naval Postgraduate School
“Development using other tools would have been a lot slower and provided less capability. The way Analytica handles multidimensional arrays is a huge advantage over spreadsheets. We are so pleased with Analytica that we're recommending it for several other major projects at Bechtel SAIC.”
—Jim Nail, Project Leader, Bechtel SAIC, LLC
“What had taken 39 spreadsheet workbooks and 9MB of disk space was now in one Analytica file, all of which takes up less than 100KB. This simulation intensive model took over 5 hours to run in spreadsheet form but only 1 1/2 hours with Analytica.”
—Brian Thomas, SENES Oak Ridge, Inc.
“Analytica makes an excellent replacement for a spreadsheet since models can be constructed directly from relationships without being constrained by the row and column paradigm of a spreadsheet.”
—David Neiger, Australian Engineer magazine
“I estimate that the time I spend writing Analytica models is one quarter to one half of that devoted to similarly complex spreadsheets.”
—ORMS Today

Monte Carlo Simulation

See the full picture: Replace single numbers with distributions.

You can easily replace any variable in your model by a probability distribution. Analytica generates sample values based on this and let you see and analyze the effects on every “downstream” variable in the model. With no special statistical expertise required.

Manage risk and uncertainty in your model assumptions

Risk and uncertainty are facts of life, which are more easily managed with Analytica. Understand and manage uncertainty explicitly, using probabilities—without requiring special statistical expertise:

  • Express uncertainty by selecting the appropriate probability distribution in Analytica’s graphical browser.
  • Propagate uncertainties throughout your model—with ease and efficiency—using Latin Hypercube or Monte Carlo sampling.
  • Display uncertain results in any form: as probability bands around the median, probability density functions, cumulative probability functions, or standard statistics.

Analytica users love the seamless integration of Monte Carlo analysis.

“We also liked the way we could use probability distributions to be explicit about uncertainties. It can flexibly display simple point estimates or entire probability density plots, according to the interest of the user.”
—Eric Pan, MD., Center for Information Technology Leadership, Boston, Massachusetts
“Once clients see the effects of uncertainty on payback and profit illustrated graphically as Analytica models, they become much less intimidated by the data, and ultimately, more profitable decision makers.”
—Robert Brown, Partner, Decision Strategies, Inc.
“Analytica beats other decision analysis software packages we have used hands down as a general purpose decision modeling tool.”
—Tony Cox, Cox and Associates
“The Last Word: If you have any professional responsibility for decisions involving money, buy Analytica and learn to use it. Once you understand Analytica modeling, you'll see why common spreadsheet single-number predictions in business are so often useless and misleading.”
—Charles Seiter, MacWorld

But wait, there is more...

Influence diagrams, Intelligent Arrays™, and integrated Monte Carlo simulation make Analytica already an outstanding package for financial modeling that goes way beyond what is at all possible with Excel or other spreadsheet software. But on top of this you get a vast array of other features.
Comprehensive  function libraries
Create user-defined functions and libraries
Read and write to Excel, text files, and databases
Expression Assist provides help as you write formulas
Automated sensitivity and importance analysis
Create input and output forms for user interfaces
Make  encrypted browse-only versions for end users
Dynamic functions for Systems Dynamics Modeling
OLE linking to Excel, Word, or Powerpoint
Filed modules for distributed work on large models
Procedural programming for more flexibility and power
Scripting language to automate model behaviour
Read data from the internet via HTTP or FTP
Performance Profiler to spot speed & memory bottlenecks
Solver for linear, quadratic, nonlinear etc. optimization

Try Analytica for yourself. Or play along with us.

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