Crystal Ball Pro Brings Hewlett-Packard's
Marketing Efforts into Focus

Michael Hart works as a Marketing Product Specialist within the Market Intelligence area of Hewlett-Packard. He has been using Crystal Ball for over 7 years to aid in difficult marketing decisions surrounding the forecasting of demand, new product launches and product line extensions for Hewlett-Packard's printers. Michael has also recently begun to employ Crystal Ball Pro in an effort to further focus his market research and decision making.

When evaluating the launching of a new product or extending a current product line, significant market research and testing is conducted to obtain a general idea as to the viability of the product in question. The research explores areas such as potential market share, possible sales levels, desirable product attributes, market segmentation and product usage patterns and is used to forecast future product performance.

Once data is obtained from this research, Michael uses Crystal Ball's distribution fitting capabilities to fit distributions around the unknown variables in the raw data. In connection with this process, parameters are selected to define lower and upper end boundaries. Michael's next step is to perform a Monte-Carlo simulation which provides an associated probability level to potential areas of concern such as possible cannibalization of existing products and optimum pricing points for market entry. Additionally, Michael uses Crystal Ball to produce forecasts at a 95% confidence level around important financial information such as expected profit and ROI.

Crystal Ball Pro has also provided Michael with insights he would have difficulty gathering any other way. In particular, he employs the use of Tornado Charts and the Correlation Matrix to give him a better indication of the variables that are having the greatest effect on his models. The Tornado Charts allow Michael to visualize as well as quantify the impact of each variable within his forecast and the Correlation Matrix easily allows variables that depend on each other in any way to be correlated. Based on these tools, Michael can isolate "problem" variables and conduct additional market research to confirm the validity of the data. Or, he can adjust the assumptions and variables of the model, re-run the simulation and compare the results.

Michael has also experienced much success in using Crystal Ball Pro to help measure and plan production capacity. This is important because when planning production projects, Hewlett-Packard provides suppliers with estimates for the resources necessary to complete the project. Based on these estimates, the suppliers will make the necessary production equipment and personnel decisions. Before the use of Crystal Ball, suppliers could be left with unnecessary equipment purchased based on unreliable production capacity forecasts. Thanks to Crystal Ball Pro, Michael is now able to generate more reliable forecasts regarding the amount of resources necessary to fulfill a printer production project and, in turn, better prepare Hewlett-Packard's suppliers.

Michael has clearly found many uses for Crystal Ball Pro that contribute to Hewlett-Packard's status as a world-class manufacturer and a valuable business partner to their suppliers.

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