Lumina Decision Systems is the developer of the leading analytics software Analytica. Analytica is a platform for building flexible decision analytics tools. It is used to assess, manage, and reduce a wide range of risks including financial, cybersecurity, pipeline, R&D management, and climate.
Committed to continuing research and development, Lumina brings innovative decision technologies to individuals and organizations. Its consulting team helps organizations build and use effective decision tools using Analytica. The leading risk management solutions provider converts clients’ legacy spreadsheets into Analytica and coaches their analysts to get started with risk solutions. Lumina consultants engage closely with clients to develop models of the complex and uncertain environment faced by their organizations. The focus of these models is to provide insight into the important aspects of ambiguous situations, helping clients to take confident decisions. Decision makers and experts represent their objectives and knowledge in intuitive yet rigorous graphical forms.
Managing a Range of Risks for Clients with Analytica
From its inception, Analytica was designed to analyze risk and uncertainty. Unlike spreadsheet applications, Analytica doesn’t require special add-ins. Its fully integrated features for Monte Carlo simulation make it remarkably simple to add treatment of uncertainty. It runs twenty times faster than standard spreadsheets, and, most important, it is two to four times faster to build a model with Analytica. These are example areas where risk managers use Lumina’s Analytica:
- Financial risks: Investment funds, companies, nations, and regional government use Analytica to assess investment strategies and debt sustainability due to uncertainty in economic growth, interest rates, and foreign exchange rates.
- Cybersecurity risks: Analytica tools assess and manage cost-effective portfolios of countermeasures to prevent or mitigate cyber-risks.
- Pipeline risks: Gas utilities assess and manage pipeline leak and explosion risks due to corrosion, defects, third-party damage, earthquakes, and other sources. Analytica lets users design and assess mitigation projects, and select the most cost-effective projects to reduce risks.
- R&D management: Energy and pharmaceutical companies use Analytica to manage a portfolio of R&D projects. This portfolio helps the users to maximize return subject to technical, regulatory, and market risks.
- Climate risks: Using Analytica, government and state agencies, such as Department of Energy, California Air Resources Board, and the World Bank estimate risks from climate change and evaluate the costs and effectiveness of policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Talented CEO Contributing the Growth of Lumina
In 1991, the Founder and CEO, Max Henrion established Lumina in Silicon Valley. During his PhD study, Max developed the core innovations and algorithms for analyzing risk and uncertainty. As a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he published dozens of papers and three books on decision making under risk; uncertainty, and artificial intelligence. He founded Lumina to make the fruits of his research available to a wider audience as commercial software.
Last year, for his distinguished contributions in decision analysis, Max won the “2018 Ramsey Medal” awarded by the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society for his distinguished contributions to the theory and practice of decision analysis. Today, Max continues to contribute in designing Analytica, and leading Lumina’s consulting practice to build custom decision and risk tools.
Lumina’s Team Efforts Handling Risks for Clients
The Lumina team has deep knowledge and wide experience in methods for assessing and managing risk and uncertainty. The team members understand that each client faces a unique set of risks as well as upside opportunities. They engage closely with each client to understand their specific needs and tailor an exclusive risk management solution. Analytica makes it easy for Lumina team and clients to extend and customize solutions. This in turn helps customers to cope with new risks and pursue new opportunities as their business evolves. Analytica’s unique transparency and flexibility makes this process dramatically easier and faster than conventional platforms.
Building Custom Applications with Feature Packed Analytica
Lumina developed its Analytica solution to enable customers rapidly build effective risk management solutions. It also offers training for clients who want to build or extend their own applications. The key advantages of Analytica as a risk development platform include:
- Transparency: Users can build, navigate, and document models with intuitive visual influence diagrams.
- Decision focus: Clients can focus their attention on decisions to avoid and mitigate. This helps them to reduce risks and build robust and resilient strategies
- Risk analysis: Users get powerful Monte Carlo simulation support to analysis of uncertainties. This simulation allows efficient analysis of low probability high consequence events.
- No coding: The simple language and standard templates enable rapid development without programming.
- Agility: Clients can start with a simple solution that adds immediate value, which is then easy to extend to meet evolving needs. Analytica’s Intelligent Arrays™ offer the flexibility to cover a wider set of dimensions, including risk types, time periods, locations, scenarios, and mitigation options.
- Team support: Analytica Cloud Player empowers organized collaboration among risk analysts, subject matter experts, and decision makers, which is the key for effective risk management.
Lumina’s client base includes major firms in electric power, environment, manufacturing, healthcare, high-tech, oil and gas, and government agencies. This leading analytics company uses an agile development process to create an initial solution that rapidly provides value for risk reduction. Working closely with its clients, Lumina assists them to clarify, prioritize and minimize their risks and while making the most of their opportunities.
