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This paper aims to use coordinated financial statements' system properties that include exogenous and endogenous variables to answer important questions. These questions include the following: What is the financial condition of the firm? What if there is a change in the firm's exogenous variable(s) – how will the financial condition of the firm change? And, how much of a change in the firm's exogenous variable(s) is required for the firm to reach its financial goal(s)?

This paper uses coordinated financial statements to construct solvency, profitability, efficiency, liquidity and leverage (SPELL) ratios to answer the question: what is the financial condition of the firm? It answers what-if questions by changing an exogenous variable(s) and recalculating SPELL ratios. It answers how-much questions by using Excel's Goal Seek algorithm to find the required change in an exogenous variable to reach a firm's goal.

The authors find that coordinated financial statements' system properties can be used to answer important what-is, what-if and how-much questions about the firm.

The usefulness of coordinated financial statements' system properties to answer what-is, what-if and how-much questions about the firm depends – mostly on the accuracy of exogenous data used to represent the firm's external financial environment. Furthermore, the usefulness of what-if and how-much analysis depends on how appropriate the changes are in exogenous variables used to represent alternative scenarios.

Using coordinated financial statements' system properties to answer what-is, what-if and how-much questions provides the firm's financial manager the tools to not only asses the firm's current financial condition but also to assess its ability to respond to opportunities and threats posed by future scenarios.

The ability to assess the financial condition of a firm and to assess its strengths and weaknesses in key to making sound financial decisions. In addition, the consistency imposed on coordinated financial statements makes it an effective tool for discovering errors in its data.

The authors know of no similar work.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and explains the development of the evolving mental phenomenon of alternative history.

The article analyzes the role of the fiction known as the “What if?” school of speculation about the past, some of its conspicuous exemplars, and how its adaptation might affect attitudes and even prejudices about how to view life.

Present and future are not always what one thought they could become. “What if?” also gives rise to endeavours in “science” fiction and structured projections today dealing with circumstances of tomorrow and after.

Besides providing diversion, the approach serves to illustrate foresight's conception of “retrostrategy”.

Several leading companies have employed scenarios to better understand both current competitors’ potential moves as well as the possible emergence of new rivals. They have learned several principles and some ways to avoid various pitfalls. Competitor scenarios examine three broad aspects of marketplace strategy: in which product‐customer segments the competitor chooses to compete (scope); how it competes (competitive posture); and what it seeks to achieve (goals). Competitors are always at the heart of every significant analysis of the competitive or industry context. Experienced managers use competitor scenarios as a source of learning about the broader competitive context and of the implications for their firm’s strategy and operations. Competitor scenarios work best when they produce knowledge and insight that broadly informs and prepares decision makers to act rapidly as competitive conditions change. There are two distinct types of competitor scenarios that originate in two quite different forms of what‐if questions: unconstrained what‐if scenarios and constrained what‐if competitor scenarios. Unconstrained or open‐ended questions encourage scenario developers to pose any question that occurs to them pertaining to one or more rivals’ marketplace strategies. Such questions are limited only by the experience, imagination and creativity of those involved in thinking about the possible strategies of rivals. Unconstrained competitor scenarios are ideal for answering: How might new types of competitors come into the market? A distinct class of competitor scenarios revolves around invented competitors, that is, competitors that do not exist today but which could exist at some point in the future. Invented competitors shift the frame of reference to one or more rivals that, by definition, are strikingly dissimilar to any rival managers have had to contemplate to date. In contrast, constrained competitor scenarios ask: What would the competitor do if a specific set of marketplace or macro environmental end‐states or conditions were to arise? In almost all cases, competitor scenarios lead to rich insight into the firm’s own strategy alternatives‐and sometimes to alternatives not previously on the firm’s radar screen.

Financial management might be defined as the art of taking correct decisions about financial problems. Decision taking is an art and not a science because no matter how well defined a problem might be in the real world, there is always a finite quantum of uncertainty remaining that must be left to the hunch, intuition or guile of the decision‐taker. The precise quantification of uncertainty still eludes us.

This paper seeks to offer a comprehensive list of actions that help managers to prevail over numerous internal knowledge transfer barriers, an area that has received little attention thus far.

Arguments draw upon theory in knowledge management and related fields and in‐depth interviews with over 60 senior and middle managers in 20 Australian‐based multinational corporations (MNCs).

The approach established two main thrusts. First, the literature review has identified a wide range of knowledge transfer barriers that managers need to consider. However, there also is some confusion as to how to prevail over them. Second, based on the literature and fieldwork the paper highlights an extensive list of initiatives managers can employ to overcome numerous internal transfer barriers.

The number of respondents was sufficiently large to provide analytical generalisation. Whilst the paper provides a general guideline on how to overcome diverse barriers, there still is no conclusive empirical evidence based on a large‐scale comparative study giving indication about the effectiveness of diverse managerial actions to enhance knowledge transfers in the internal and external supply chain.

Senior and middle managers may utilise the provided list as an action identification tool when challenged to overcome diverse knowledge transfer barriers.

This paper highlights a large number of possible actions to overcome barriers to internal knowledge transfer. In particular, the action list serves as a starter or reassurance kit for managerial decision making when facing various barriers upon introducing, maintaining, or seeking to improve internal knowledge transfer practices. The aim, however, was no cookbook approach suggesting that a set of particular managerial actions will suit all firms, that is, specific actions are likely to show diverse levels of success and effectiveness.

The intensive care unit (ICU) in a hospital caters for critically ill patients. The number of the ICU beds has a direct impact on many aspects of hospital performance. Lack of the ICU beds may cause ambulance diversion and surgery cancellation, while an excess of ICU beds may cause a waste of resources. This paper aims to develop a discrete event simulation (DES) model to help the healthcare service providers determine the proper ICU bed capacity which strikes the balance between service level and cost effectiveness.

The DES model is developed to reflect the complex patient flow of the ICU system. Actual operational data, including emergency arrivals, elective arrivals and length of stay, are directly fed into the DES model to capture the variations in the system. The DES model is validated by open box test and black box test. The validated model is used to test two what‐if scenarios which the healthcare service providers are interested in: the proper number of the ICU beds in service to meet the target rejection rate and the extra ICU beds in service needed to meet the demand growth.

A 12‐month period of actual operational data was collected from an ICU department with 13 ICU beds in service. Comparison between the simulation results and the actual situation shows that the DES model accurately captures the variations in the system, and the DES model is flexible to simulate various what‐if scenarios.

DES helps the healthcare service providers describe the current situation, and simulate the what‐if scenarios for future planning.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a methodology to industry and academia on how to reengineer the order fulfillment process (OFP) by capitalizing on integration and coordination across the entire supply chain to sustain supply chain management.

A case study at a semiconductor equipment manufacturer in Singapore is undertaken.

This paper confirms that the traditional OFPs present companies a challenge to satisfy the demanding customer requirements while achieving performance optimization of each supply chain partner; and it is imperative to reengineer the OFPs to stay competitive. To successfully reengineer OFPs, the efforts should be systematically organized to, for example, exploit potential processes as many as possible, determine an optimal process based on mathematically sound grounds.

The use of a single case study may limit the generalizability of the findings.

A methodology incorporating accountability‐centered approach and simulation is developed for companies to reengineer OFPs while considering the entire supply chain.

The literature does not provide solutions for reengineering OFPs regardless of the fact that OFP reengineering is an emerging area of interest. This paper presents a valuable contribution to this topic by introducing a methodology and by applying the methodology to a semiconductor equipment manufacturer in Singapore.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a microeconomic-based approach to support fund-allocation decisions for a large number of assets. Under the prevailing financial constraints and rapid deterioration of facilities, arriving at optimum fund allocation for capital renewal projects has become very challenging. Due to the complexity of modeling multi-year life cycle cost analysis, existing fund-allocation methods have serious drawbacks when handling a large portfolio of assets, and their results are difficult to justify.

This paper adopts well-established theories from microeconomics and proposes a new microeconomic-based decision support framework that has two novel components: a heuristic procedure to optimize and justify fund-allocation decisions by balancing the funding among the different asset categories; and a visual what-if analysis approach inspired by the economic indifference maps.

Applying the proposed framework on a real case study of 800 building components proved that optimum decisions can be achieved through an equilibrium state at which fair and equitable allocations are made such that the utility per dollar is balanced for all asset categories. The visual what-if analysis approach presented a powerful graphical tool to visualize decisions, along with their costs and benefits, and facilitate sensitivity analysis under changes in budget levels.

This paper, using the proposed microeconomic framework, sheds a new light on how fund-allocation optimization problems can be simplified, from an economic perspective, to arrive at accurate and justifiable decisions for a large portfolio of facilities.

Examines the way in which the spreadsheet has developed into a sophisticated modelling tool. This has been achieved by considering various releases of Lotus 1‐2‐3 and the latest version of Microsoft Excel. Refers to specific spreadsheet facilities, but does not provide the mechanical details of invoking the various commands, in order that the ideas described can be transferred to other spreadsheets offering similar facilities. Explores the development of the spreadsheet on two fronts; first with reference to its functional and programmable capability, and second by considering the advancement of its “what if” facilities.