Palisade customers attending the 2006 Palisade User Conference: Americas in Miami, Nov. 13-14 will get the first-ever look at the all-new @RISK 5.0 and its new companion products in the DecisionTools® Suite, PrecisionTree® and TopRank®.
:: Regional Seminars
Risk and Decision Assessment Training using @RISK and the DecisionTools Suite
October 2-3, Ithaca
October 9-10, Baltimore
October 23-24, Columbus
November 6-7, San Jose
:: User Conference Americas
November 13-14, Miami
:: Live Web Training
Risk and Decision Assessment Training using @RISK, Part I
October 30-31
Risk and Decision Assessment Training using @RISK, Part II
November 2-3
Project Risk Assessment using @RISK for Project
October 5-6
Expert Answers to
Technical Questions
Dear Amy,
Is it possible to consider non-@RISK function cells as @RISK inputs for evaluation in the simulation sensitivity and scenario analysis?
— R.W.
Dear R.W.,
Yes. Any cell's value can be trapped as an @RISK sample by referencing the cell as an argument inside a "dummy" @RISK function. For example, let’s say you have data in cell A1 that you would like to evaluate. In another cell, you could enter the formula =RiskNormal
(A1, 0).
Palisade Software in Healthcare
In Europe as well as the United States, Palisade software has been widely used to improve healthcare. Applications include both the practice and business of healthcare.
:: @RISK and NeuralTools in the Lab
In a medical application with immediate implications for more than 800 patients, Palisade's Neural Networks package NeuralTools has been used with great success by a team of German pathologists to predict the likely diagnosis of brain tumors. This important research, initiated soon after NeuralTools was released last year, made the most of the software’s classification capabilities, and the diagnoses the team predicted proved more than 98% accurate. The researchers now plan to extend their study to analyze more than 30 years worth of brain tumor data.
Palisade's leading risk analysis tool @RISK was essential to recent research on blood transfusion safety. When a new donor-screening technique that promised protection against hepatitis B infection was made available in Europe, @RISK was used to simulate how many lives the new procedure would save and at what cost. Researchers analyzed historical data from a hospital in Barcelona to carry out and publish the results of three investigations of the question. These simulated the uncertainties inherent in each stage of the disease process of hepatitis and coordinated the resulting probabilities with projected mortality rates and the costs of screening. Because the analyses predicted a small increase of longevity at a relatively high cost, the research did not support widespread adoption of the screening technique across Europe.
:: @RISK Joins NeuralTools and StatTools in the Office
In another NeuralTools study, this time with numeric prediction as the goal and StatTools working with it, Palisade software was used in Richmond, Virginia to reveal predictors of hospital patient load across the metropolitan hospital system. The city had experienced system-wide patient overload on a number of occasions and wanted to plan for adequate beds and staff in times of peak need. StatTools was brought in for correlation and other types of analysis of patient level data. Next, NeuralTools was trained on the large body of patient data to help determine the numbers necessary for the hospitals to plan their staffing levels.
As government turns increasingly to private agencies to provide healthcare services, one recurring dilemma is “What is a fair price for those services?” @RISK has been used by state governments to address the politically charged issues that surround the privatization of mental health services. For many years, @RISK models have been looking ahead as much as a decade to project values for the many human and economic variables that influence the pricing of mental health services. Often accounting for more than 200 variables at multiple decision points, @RISK simulations reveal not only the ideal price for services but the ideal modes of treatment.
read healthcare related case studies 
learn more about @RISK
learn more about NeuralTools
learn more about StatTools
Case Study:
IKB Deutsche Industriebank uses @RISK for Portfolio Loan Pricing
The core business of IKB Deutsche Industriebank is the financing of medium-sized companies operating in the manufacturing, commercial, and service sectors. With over 40 billion euros in assets, IKB offers customized financing solutions.
:: Pricing Portfolio Loans: A New Challenge
Jörg Günther, manager of the Structured Products Division for IKB, was tasked with pricing IKB’s portfolio loans. Portfolio loans are loans that a lender holds onto instead of selling on the secondary market. To keep their in-house assets at a certain level, lenders keep some loans in-house, as part of their “portfolio.” Portfolio loans don’t have to stick to the rules set by secondary market institutions, leaving room for much more uncertainty.
The normal method for pricing loans was to analyze three arbitrary scenarios: best case, worst case, and most likely case. However, Günther understood that this method was inadequate to account for the wild variability in portfolio loan factors ranging from interest rates to borrower cash flows. The only way to price portfolio loans was using Monte Carlo simulation.
:: @RISK Provides "The Best Knowledge"
Günther turned to Palisade's @RISK software because of the product's stature in the marketplace
. According to Günther, "Using @RISK, we have been able to price our portfolio loans very effectively, knowing we had the best knowledge available to us to make the decisions required." @RISK distributions successfully modeled variables such as cash flows, interest rates, and equity tranche. All in all, said Günther, "@RISK helps us judge which risks to take and which ones to avoid."
view the full IKB Deutsche Industriebank case study
read other banking and finance case studies
learn more about @RISK
Product Spotlight:
Technical Support and Maintenance Plans
Technology is advancing at an astonishing rate, making a Palisade Maintenance Plan more important than ever for maximizing your risk and decision analysis software benefits. Furthermore, given the complexity of tasks that Palisade's risk and decision analysis tools solve, the need for technical assistance is bound to arise at some point.
:: Benefits of Palisade's Maintenance Plan
With Palisade Maintenance Plans, you get all you need in a single plan. Palisade Maintenance Plans include:
- Unlimited technical support incidents for 12 months.
- Access to the Palisade online HelpDesk 24 hours per day. With the HelpDesk, you can submit new incidents and check the status of open problems.
- Unlimited, 24-hour access to Palisade’s online technical support KnowledgeBase. A tremendous self-help resource, this is the same database of information the Palisade technical support staff uses. A quick check of the KnowledgeBase often solves the problem in just a few minutes.
- Free automatic full version upgrades for 12 months. Any new major releases of the covered software will automatically be made available at no charge.
- Guaranteed 24 hour or next business day Technical Support response time.
- Free software maintenance updates, such as bug fixes or minor product enhancements.
- Automatically renewed and billed every 12 months to ensure support never lapses.
:: Lapsed Maintenance Plan Renewal Grace Period
With the imminent release of @RISK 5.0 and companion products, Palisade is offering a penalty-free Maintenance Plan renewal period to October 31, 2006. Not only will customers avoid a reactivation fee of 20% of their overall annual Maintenance fee per lapsed year if they renew by October 31, but they will also be able to upgrade to @RISK 5.0 at no additional charge.
To get a customized Maintenance Plan renewal quote, call 800 432 RISK or send us an e-mail.
learn more about Technical Support and Maintenance Plans
read maintenance customer testimonials
Preview @RISK 5.0 at User Conference continued from above
The conference will feature a comprehensive demonstration tour of the new software, opportunities to meet leading Palisade developers, a keynote address by author David Apgar, and numerous case studies from risk and decision management professionals.
:: Highlights of @RISK 5.0 and the DecisionTools Suite
Sam McLafferty, Palisade President and CEO stated, "Our development team has included extensive customer feedback into the @RISK 5.0 roll-out. We're very excited a
bout its new capabilities, and look forward to its unveiling at the User Conference in Miami." Delegates will see @RISK and companion tools that have been comprehensively revised to respond to customer requests and to take advantage of the improvements incorporated in Excel 2007.
The demo tour will show you how you can:
- Speed up your analysis with an even more intuitive interface.
- Never leave your spreadsheet to work in @RISK 5.0. All graphs and reports are directly linked to your model in Excel.
- Build and run larger models that make the most of the newly increased capacity of Excel 2007.
- Enjoy easy corporate-wide use with @RISK Libraries. Standardizing modeling inputs and sharing results has never been easier.
- Generate Six Sigma-specific reports with just a few clicks.
Keep watching for announcements of the beta versions of @RISK 5.0 and the DecisionTools Suite 5.0, coming soon!
:: Conference Sessions and Abstracts Available
From hurricane disaster recovery to the economics of baseball betting, the Miami user conference offers a wide range of standout presentations and real world case studies, including a keynote address by David Apgar, author of the newly published book, Risk Intelligence: Learning to Manage What We Don’t Know, and Managing Director of the Corporate Executive Board. Also, for the first time ever, an entire track of case studies and workshops will be presented in Spanish for Palisade’s expanding Spanish-speaking customer base.
The sessions focus both on how Palisade tools are used in important industries and on modeling techniques that can be translated to any business or research effort. The conference is an efficient way to learn new approaches and new techniques, check out Palisade software tools you haven’t tried yet, as well as meet other professionals in your field.
:: Special Room Rate for Palisade User Conference: Miami
The Ritz-Carlton Coconut Grove, Miami is offering rooms to Palisade customers for $150 a night. Only a limited number of rooms are available at this rate, so make your reservations early, and make sure to mention the Palisade User Conference. For reservations at this rate, call 305 644 4680 ext 5634, ask for Xenia Jones, and mention the Palisade User Conference. You can also email Xenia Jones at xenia.jones@ritzcarlton.com
view conference schedule
read case study abstracts and presenter bios
register for the 2006 Palisade User Conference: Miami
view other hotels near the conference
Ask Amy continued from above
When @RISK simulates the model it will save the results of cell A1 as though it was an @RISK input.
Because the standard deviation is zero there will be no additional sampling error due to the “dummy” RiskNormal.
See an example of this modeling tip in our Web KnowledgeBase.
learn more about @RISK
KnowledgeBase articles about Palisade Software
E-mail comments or suggestions to: sales@palisade.com
©2006 Palisade Corporation, 798 Cascadilla Street, Ithaca, NY 14850 USA
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