Posted in Business, Games and puzzles, Tools & methodologies on Jul 18th, 2008 1 Comment »
One of the activities conducted during the System Dynamics class in Colombia was the Beer Game - El Juego de la Cerveza
It allows students to experience first-hand how structure of business organizations impact their behavior, to some extent irrespectively of how skilled their managers may be. In the game, a 3 tier distribution system [...]
Posted in Business, Commentary, Strategy on Jul 15th, 2008 No Comments »
It is refreshing to see when developed countries take note and learn from the success stories of developing countries. In particular, Transmilenio, Bogota’s Rapid Transit System, is an example of what E.F. Schumacher called “Appropriate Technology”
Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s mayor writes on The Economist
…we drew on the experiences of Berlin for our renewable-energy [...]
Posted in Business, Tools & methodologies on Jun 9th, 2008 6 Comments »
I’m very excited about the invitation I received by Universidad de los Andes to talk about policy and decision making using a systems dynamics perspective.
I haven’t been back to Bogota since 1999, except a quick stop-over during our honeymoon.
This is also exciting as I will add more content to this website in preparation for the [...]
Posted in Business, Excel, Tools & methodologies on Dec 21st, 2007 1 Comment »
I have received a number of comments regarding the Simplified Excel Model for market adoption published a few months ago. Reader Vince asked how to extend the math behind it to comprehend effects like cross-segment interactions.
There is no simple answer, and this post is an attempt to point readers to ways to think about [...]
Posted in Business, Excel, Strategy, Tools & methodologies on Jul 30th, 2007 6 Comments »
The simplified market adoption model I described on previous postings (1,2) is an Excel implementation of a kind of logistic function. The Bass model is one of the most popular models used in marketing, and management of technology to think about product introductions. (See Wikipedia article). From a mathematical perspective, when the [...]
Posted in Business, Data analysis, Excel, Tools & methodologies on Jul 16th, 2007 3 Comments »
Mekko charts are two dimensional graphs that analyze how data is partitioned against two variables, the X and Y axes. The width of the columns is proportional to data represented by the columns. Individual segment height is a percentage of the respective bar total value.
Posted in Data analysis, Excel, Tools & methodologies on Jul 13th, 2007 No Comments »
Two improvements over the technique described by Juice Analytics and posted in Lifehacker: better resolution and solid-looking bars that show better at different font sizes.
If your values are integers in a range 0-9 or so, you can use the REPT formula as presented there, and perhaps you like the dashed type bars, so the formula [...]
Posted in Data analysis, Excel, Tools & methodologies on Jul 6th, 2007 10 Comments »
I’ve got a number of questions on the simplified Excel s-curve formula I published some time ago, so here are more details for those interested in the math behind it. The previous posting focused on how business analysts sometimes need to model market adoption, and provided a simple and easy to maintain formula to [...]
Posted in Business, Data analysis, Excel, Tools & methodologies on May 11th, 2007 No Comments »
The sites I refer to when I talk about charting, data analysis and good (and bad) charting techniques are normally quite different from the ones where I satisfy my gearhead lust with the news from the latest car models in the market. This time the guys at motortrend did it for me in their [...]
Posted in Business, Data analysis, Excel, Finance, Tools & methodologies on Apr 24th, 2007 23 Comments »
UPDATE 10/31/2007: Here is a screencast for this model
Often business analysts need to model the adoption of a new product or service for financial planning. There are several approaches, but a common one is the s-curve (see Wikipedia article). Here is a simple implementation in Excel that can be easily added to your [...]
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