The VMx Software

APPENDIX -THE VMx SOFTWARE

ValueMetrix has made substantial investments into a proprietary software that allows us to quickly and reliably perform cause-and-effect analyses and share the results with partners and clients.

The VMx software makes the statistical analyses in a software called STATISTICA but the user interface and report-generating facilities are all made in Excel. To this end, some 80,000 rows of VBA code are needed to achieve the quality and speed needed for consultants to be able to swiftly and reliably deliver top quality results.

VMx Designer

For clients with own analytical resources and for partner firms, we have developed VMx Designer, a bilingual analytical application with plenty of logical tests, explanatory messages, help texts, and macro-building facilities. With this efficient tool, the ValueMetrix analyses are done quickly under constant quality control and with full audit trails.

VMx Viewer

VMx Viewer is an entirely Excel-based application with restricted validity. It contains the same report-generating facility as VMx Designer. We can distribute it to clients over the Internet together with locked and condensed result files that only contain the data that a specific manager has the permission to access.

The menu-driven output from the VMx software consists of two main categories:

Reports with information about many items for a specific segment
Overviews with information about a specific item for many segments.

Below you get a flavor of the output from a simplified customer case, all available in seconds in VMx Viewer. The output below is just selected examples of what can be shared within an organization on paper or as PDF or XPS files. With access to VMx Designer, users can modify the output in many different ways.

The examples below are built on slightly modified data from an Internet-based bank here called "eBANCA".

Cover

The first page in a typical ValueMetrix report as shared within an organization for information purposes is simply just a cover that tells the reader what the report contains information about

Overview - Scores

The second page typically shows top level scores with Confidence Intervals for the key segments in the analysis. When distributed to business unit managers, the results for the business unit in question are marked with a special color/pattern to simplify for the manager to find how his/her unit is performing

Analysis Structure

Once the analysis structure has been finalized in VMx Designer with the help of various quality measures, the cause-and-effect analyses can be run and the results can be presented in a diagram where colors and the thickness of the arrows show which the strongest Behavior Drivers are and to what extent they influence the Desired Behavior when the stakeholder has perceived a change in the supplier's offering

Positioning Graph

As a general rule, it is likely that performance drivers getting high scores with low impacts may indicate a cost-saving opportunity while drivers getting low scores with high impacts should be closely evaluated for profit-improving actions. These relationships are described in "Positioning Graphs".

Summary Table

The Summary page in the standard report has the Positioning Graph on top followed by a table with key scores for the business unit and comparisons with a higher-level unit.This Summary table can also include for example Net Promoter Scores or other similar measures and can be followed by detailed scores, facts, and comparisons using the same format as in the Summary table.

Quality Certificate

The Quality Certificate page in the standard report includes the most important quality measures including relevant confidence intervals. Boxes with blue background and white text indicate strong results based upon the limits defined when generating the certificate. Likewise, red indicates weak results.

Score/Impact Plots

Just like the Positioning Graphs, the Score/Impact plots show the combination of scores and impacts, but in these plots you compare several segments regarding the same behavior driver and not the various drivers against each other.The Score/Impact plots are a convenient way to find differences in behavior drivers between segments. When you have data from several periods, these graphs can also show the changes in behavior drivers over time with arrows showing the path that the behavior driver has followed.

Frequencies

The Frequencies diagram can be generated when the result file used for the cause-and-effect analyses includes the raw data from the data collection after the conversion to the requirements of the ValueMetrix' software.This diagram has little to do with the financial calculations but may anyway be important for business unit management to get in order to better understand the scores given by the stakeholders.

Time Series

The Time Series function is available also for a specific segment showing the development of scores and impacts, with or without confidence intervals, over time.The line across the graph makes it easy to see if the results for a certain period really are better or worse than before; when using scores to promote or reward staff it is important to know if good or weak results just are a consequence of randomness

Tables for several segments

Sometimes it is interesting to easily compare detailed scoring differences between segments. The "Tables" report allows you to do this for max eight selected segments

Open answers

The Open Questions may be an important help when looking for performance improvement actions. In VMx Designer and VMx Viewer, you can read each answer one by one or search for key words from respondents from a certain segment. Whenever possible, each Open Answer is accompanied by an Identifier text that reveals if the answer comes from a key target customer or perhaps just from an unimportant customer who likes to express his or her opinion in social media