June 1, 2010 the Swiss Association of Management Consultants (ASCO) awarded the certificate "Excellent Business Transformation" to the project "Plan@HR - Strategische Personalplanung mit Weitblick".

The project improves the balance between the global personnel planning and the business needs of Evonik Industries AG.

"The right worker at the right time at the right place" is the objective for this strategic personnel planning project. The project relies on Dynaplan Smia for scenario simulation in combination with systemic methodology for gaining an holistic perspective on personnel dynamics.

After an initial project phase from January 2009 until February 2010 the implementation of the strategies for maintaining the correct employee portfolio turned HR from an operational service center into a strategic partner for the corporation.

For some years now I have been monitoring the postings of the EUSPRIG. It strikes me that many of the risks of using spreadsheets would be greatly reduced or even completely removed if spreadsheets would use built-in quality measures similar to those found in Smia.

Obviously, many spreadsheet models fail due to human mistakes. The pity is that

spreadsheets allow users to make mistakes that modelling software could have - and should have - prevented automatically.

The current global financial situation has impacts on most companies. It is no longer possible to plan for the future by making small adjustments to the figures from last year.

With Dynaplan Smia customers can develop and test out strategies for dealing with changes in the business and its environment. Together with Malik Management Zentrum, St. Gallen, Dynaplan As offers the technology, methods, and services businesses need for assessing short-term and long-term consequences of different strategies for dealing with the current crisis.

The difference between a number and a value, is that the value has a unit. Without units, numbers cannot be interpreted outside their implicit or explicit context. As an example, the number 52 could represent anything from your age or weight (in pounds, kilograms or stones....) to the number of cards in your deck of playing cards.

The use of explicit units on numbers, can greatly enhance readability and prevent unit consitency errors, such as "adding apples and bananas".

Various software tools provide different levels of support for units. The lack of units in current spreadsheets tools like Microsoft Excel, represents one of the biggest quality assurance problems with that technology.

This article describes the main levels of unit support and how they influence usability and usefulness from an end-user perspective.

SD - System Dynamics

Dynaplan Smia is used in a project for the Swiss post to improve the staffing situation in response to rapid development and change of the postal services due to technology change (SMS and Internet, for example) and shifts in demand.

Read more about the project here (Text in German).

Can economic growth continue forever? Will technology development solve growth related problems faster than we create them? Or will our planet in the near future face limits such as pollution, food shortage, and population density?

In 1971 Jay Forrester published his book World Dynamics, where he presented a high-level simulation model of the socio-economic-environmental world system. The main purpose of the model and the accompanying book was to encourage an open debate about the long-term future on our planet.

The Club of Rome, a non-profit research organization, appointed Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows and others to elaborate on the work initiated by Forrester.

The resulting report, Limits to Growth, became a bestseller almost over night.

The spreadsheets is the assembly language for financial modeling.