Our Platform
As practitioners with many years of experience designing and executing strategy, we have often been frustrated with the tools at our disposal.
Ārahi is our answer: a SaaS platform that draws on management consulting, data and analysis and print design principles. A platform capable of producing print-ready documents of unparalleled elegance. Simple to populate and delightful to read.
Methodology
Our 4D Framework is based on our many years of management consulting experience:
Diagnose today, Design tomorrow, Draw the plan and Deliver the plan.
Confront your brutal reality. Perform a holistic assessment of your business in the present day. Ask questions, collect information and forensically analyse.
Design tomorrowDesign your vision of an ambitious and desirable, but achievable future state. Distil it to fit on one page that can be easily communicated and understood.
Draw the plan
Build a step-by-step, logical plan. Stipulate tactics and timing and factor in risk. Which actions are needed, by when and who needs to do them
Deliver
Execute your plan and be prepared to re-route when necessary. Celebrate moments of success.
Read our book: Strategic Value Creation, to learn more.
Software
In our platform, data science meets graphic design. Numbers meet Words. Words become numbers while data becomes pictures.
The result is elegantly designed, print-ready documents containing just the right amount of numbers, graphics and words to take the effort out of reading, understanding and decision-making.
Data
Data is the most valuable asset that any business owns. It fuels decisions and helps you to move faster with greater confidence. But once hailed as the ‘new oil’ it can, like oil, bring disaster if it’s not managed properly.
Organisations typically have data in unconnected silos, including:
- Management accounts, budgets and financial plans in Excel islands
- General ledger entries in finance systems
- Sales data in customer relationship management (CRM) systems
- Marketing data from social media and customer feedback
- People data in human resources information systems (HRIS)
- Timesheets in time tracking software
The most common solutions to these problems include data lakes and data warehouses. Data lakes (containing raw data in an unstructured form) can quickly become data swamps. Data warehouses (containing structured data) are usually based on star schema relational models. They are complex, fragile beasts and consume a lot of time and resources.
We manage data differently
- Input data with ease, no matter what shape it’s in
- Structure and connect data
- Understand data over time
Input data with ease
We start with the reality of where you are and build from there. It’s as easy as copy and paste. Take data directly from wherever you store it – your Excel budget, or list of opportunities with pipeline stage data – and paste it directly into the platform.
We deal with different data shapes that are more often than not, messy. And not just transactional event data. We expect human generated Excel analysis too. For instance, working budgets or reforecasts with your typical formatting with rows with gaps or column totals mixed in with monthly numbers.
Structure and connect data
We transform each bit of raw data (think of it as each cell) into an Ārahi Atom. We break it down and then build it back-up from within our platform.
We take the raw data and then do the calculations. We map your data to flexible hierarchical schemas so you get the benefit of templated documents and pre-build analysis. You can stack, merge, and curate new datasets from within the platform.
Understand data over time
Everything is relative. Relative to what it was. Relative to what you desire. Relative to what you expected. So we make your data relative too.
At Ārahi, every piece of data is either a Target, Actual, or Forecast. We call this TAF-arising. Targets are what we aim to achieve by a point in time. Actuals are what we achieve. Forecasts are what we think we will achieve. Key initiatives, projects and actions can all be TAF-arised. So can budgets, sales targets and even risks. Keeping track of this data over time shows how priorities and realities shift.
Design
At Ārahi, design is in our DNA.
Our platform has been built using well-known print and digital design principles. We make it easy to create print-ready documents containing commentary, tables and graphs that are elegantly presented and effortless to understand.
Documents
Our platform produces high-spec documents which are fully customisable with brand colours, logos and imagery.
Our documents contain pre-designed media and text elements, which we call tiles. A tile is like a block of Lego. It can be used universally, again and again, in multiple documents.
No more copy and pasting visuals or manually entering data. No more styling tables in PowerPoint. No more loading a PDF into a document management system to share your board reports. Let Ārahi curate your data for you.
“I would have signed this off as print-ready from a designer’
Annie, Ārahi Creative and Brand Manager
