An example of interactively setting goals and constraints in the conference room
Gone are the days where the portfolio analyst runs a hugely complex liner program in an office, outputs a few “optimum” portfolios, and presents to management “the answer” in a static PowerPoint presentation.
The BlitzPort process allows you to bring tens of thousands of legitimate portfolios into the conference room. Managers can interactively apply goals and limits, test strategies, an negotiate goals using Spotfire.
Here we see 20,000 potential portfolios in an Exploration business. Each portfolio is a dot in some plots, a line in others. The X-Axis “CumCapex Y18” refer to the amount of capex to commit over in the planning years 1 through 8.
Summing the 90% confidence level of each project does NOT result in the 90% confidence level of the portfolio. The 90% confidence of the portfolio {P90) will be greater than to sum of the 80% confidence of the projects. This is called a NON-LINEAR calculation. Non-linear terms cannot be used in linear models1. A great many financial measures depend on nonlinear terms. Return on Investment, Return on Capital Employed, Discounted Cash Flow Rate of Return, Years to Payoff, and all Cost-per-unit type of measures are non-linear.
In the Blitzport process we apply limits after calculating the portfolio measures. We avoid the limitations of linear programming completely. We can compare and evaluate results from linear, integer, and non-linear measures together in one Spotfire view.
1 Some non-linear terms, such as Cost/Unit < X can be rewritten into a linear form: Cost – X*Unit < 0 and used in LP models. Other measures such as Discount Cash Flow Rate of Return cannot be reconfigured into a linear equation. Most statistical measures, other than mean and variance, cannot be made linear.