Home Frontier Analyst® Overview

“Frontier Analyst is probably the most user friendly of the packages, particularly in terms of presentation of results, giving many different outputs …As such, it would probably appeal the most for straightforward managerial and policy applications …” The Economic Journal.

An overview of Frontier Analyst

If you are interested in the performance of your business, then you will be interested in Frontier Analyst. It provides you with detailed insights into how your business units are performing and how their performance can be improved. And what is more, because the measurement is based on peer-group comparisons, the improvement targets are realistic. Frontier Analyst is in use in many businesses today, ranging from SME’s through to multi-national corporations. Companies such as Whitbread plc, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Bank of Scotland and Direct Line Insurance all use Frontier Analyst for evaluating efficiency.

The onus is on managers to achieve better results from the resources available to them. If all business units operated under identical conditions, it would be easier to compare their performance and determine what should be done to improve output. But in the real world each unit functions within a slightly different environment. This is where Frontier Analyst comes in.

Frontier Analyst uses a method known as “data envelopment analysis” (DEA), which sometimes referred to as comparative performance assessment or peer based analysis, to analyse the relative performance of business units performing similar functions. With an easy to use interface, it allows you to study, in detail, the efficiency of your organisation and shows you where improvements can be made. Building on the success of Frontier Analyst Standard, we have used our experience and feedback from managers to produce a new Professional edition, an even more powerful efficiency analysis tool. It provides numerical and graphical output for easy interpretation and communication of results.

To provide a complete service we can provide training and (through third parties) consultancy services, if you require them.

A recent review in the journal OR/MS Today stated that:
“One of the strongest features of Frontier Analyst is the variety of outputs it produces. It supports all standard output information provided by DEA plus some excellent graphic representations of the relationships among DMUs…
Public policy makers and business managers need improved analytic tools to enhance decision making. There is a continued, growing need to find ways to increase efficiency in both the public and private sectors. DEA represents a promising method of addressing this need. The availability of specific DEA software applications, like Frontier Analyst, will help to de-emphasise the mathematics of the analysis while hopefully increasing its conceptual understanding and usefulness as a decision making tool.” OR/MS Today.

Frontier Analyst Professional has the following key features, which we believe make it the best data envelopment analysis product available:

• The friendly user interface acclaimed in independent reviews has been further enhanced.
• Weighting facility to ensure that important factors are always considered.
• Versions supporting from 75 to ‘unlimited’ decision making units.
• Flexible import facilities from both file and spreadsheet using a unique “wizard”.
• Input data filtering and individual unit inclusion/exclusion provide flexible input data management. Filtering supports text and date fields as well as numbers.
• Input/output variable selection so powerful “what-if” evaluations are easy to perform.
• Tabular scores report (with a variety of sorting methods) and graphical summary.
• High quality ‘3D’ zoom-able graph displays of all the aspects of the analysis – “one of the strongest features is the variety of outputs produced, plus excellent graphic representations of the relationships between units”. New graphs include improvement summaries and score distribution summaries.
• Report generator for flexible printed reports, with an optional report designer for customisation.

These all combine to give you a very flexible and powerful efficiency analysis package with features that no other similar software provides.

To ensure that you get the best value out of Frontier Analyst, a full support service is available:

• A variety of support options are now available to give users added confidence.
• Training courses are run to help you get a fast start into using the software.
• Consultancy is available in conjunction with independent consultants.

Read the information on these pages, and see the screen shots. Any questions? Ready to order? Just email us at info@banxia.com.

Convince yourself how good Frontier Analyst is by downloading the working demonstration now.