Mandrel is a costing tool which helps you capture and analyse uncertainty.
Projects and programs have a tendency to exceed their budgets. Very often this occurs, not because of poor management but because the budget itself was insufficient.
Insufficient budgets typically result from a failure to make allowance for uncertainty.
As far as cost is concerned, there are two types of uncertainty:
- Quantity uncertainty (how much will it cost to do the things we know about?)
- Scope uncertainty (what exactly needs to be done?)
Mandrel lets you:
- Capture uncertainties in individual costs such as labor, materials and subcontracts;
- Capture scope uncertainties (risks) by assigning probabilities to expenditures;
- Track both certain and uncertain costs as a function of time;
- Show bottom-line costs, cost variances, and risk exposures.
In addition, Mandrel lets you deal with price lists, taxes and foreign currencies, perform cash flow predictions and cost performance calculations, handle a broad range of risk analysis, set your data up for Monte Carlo analysis (using @Risk software), provide audit trails of changes, and much more.
