Happy Release Day … In the golden autumn season not only the pear trees shine far and wide, but also the ‘leaves’ of our driver trees get a new coat of paint. Of course, not without reason. These and all other innovations at a glance.
Valsight has been released in version 4.0 and shines with further enhanced functionalities and another performance upgrade. The focus, however, was on improvements to the user experience: We have tightened up the essentials of the UI, making it easier to work with scenario simulations, forecasts and driver trees, and providing more intuitive access to driver-based performance management.
Collaborative work across departmental boundaries also becomes easier. But from the beginning:
Focus on user experience
The look of the Valsight dashboard and charts has been redesigned in all relevant areas. Data effects are presented and titled in more detail. The update is not just pure cosmetics, but serves to improve clarity and makes working on driver trees and scenarios more convenient.
Driver trees also get colorful leaves
For example, in the driver tree editor, the individual nodes and ‘branches’ – i.e. the edges – can now be colored freely. The result is a faster and better overview of the cause-effect relationships of key measures and drivers:
The possibility to display an inverted deviation logic (red / green) is now also supported for tables and deviation or Hichert bars:
In addition, error handling for uploading acceptance data has been improved, as has the placement of sub-model nodes. A small but often requested improvement concerns the table columns: Their width is now preserved instead of always adapting to the contents.
Search and filter
The search function has been upgraded for better and faster usability: Sheets can now be searched using the familiar CTRL+F key combination. It is now also possible to search directly for the nodes.
Efficiency and accessibility
For best usability, some keyboard shortcuts have been added – especially for typical work steps like switching between the Scenario Manager and the last modified spreadsheet, users now save time. Standard functions like renaming sheets have been simplified in the process.
Functions
The handling of various functions has been improved. Among other things, the LOOKUP function was introduced: Values can now be searched or inserted across tables, helpful for modeling salary-based tax modalities, for example.
The SHIFT, MULTIPLY and DIVIDE functions have been adapted and also offer easier handling.
The ROLLFORWARD_MUL function has been added and provides a simple and useful way of updating.
Performance & Distributed Work
In the future, it will be possible to work in models and workspaces in a much more parallel manner. We have removed technical restrictions in this regard and thus simplified collaborative work. Across country borders, time zones or simply departments, the proverbial silos thus become sparser. Until now, one risk was that resource-consuming processes could bring the system to its knees.
The Valsight SaaS therefore now automatically prioritizes and distributes computationally intensive tasks. Data exports and other resource-intensive processes are performed asynchronously in the background, also to prevent timeouts if the server or Internet connection is a bit slow.
The scenario manager as well as the dashboard also benefit from performance improvements – in some cases our development team was able to measure up to four times faster performance! Last but not least, this may also please users, who may benefit from a much more resource-efficient export and observe how workspaces and diagrams are rendered much faster.
Even more info
For more info take a look at our Blog or our Wiki, follow us on LinkedIn or contact our experts right now and order a live demo or request a POC to test the benefits of scenario simulation and driver-based planning and forecasting right away in a pilot project.
