What can Lumina consulting do for you?
Lumina’s award-winning consulting team provides advice, coaching, and custom decision tools to help your organization make more effective decisions. Using Analytica, we—or you—can develop clear, reliable, and flexible decision-support applications in a small fraction of the time and cost compared with using spreadsheets and other conventional tools.
Decision frameworks
Lumina will work with you to define a decision making framework, or provide guidance on how to refine an existing framework. An effective framework addresses stakeholders’ key considerations, accounts for uncertainty and data limitations, is logically coherent, is computationally tractable, and provides a clear path to answering the most important questions and to making good decisions.
Validate spreadsheets and convert existing tools to Analytica
Are you finding your models in spreadsheets, Matlab, R, Python, or other platforms too error-prone, inflexible, obscure, user-hostile, or hard to scale? Converting them into Analytica is often a quick solution. When we translate high-stakes spreadsheets and other models, we often find—and fix—several serious errors. The Analytica version will be much clearer, more reliable, and vastly more extensible, making it easy to add new features, dimensions, and a clear user interface. We can do the conversion for you, or coach you through the process.
Enhance your Analytica models
If you’re already developing an Analytica model, we can assist your team with a quick review to suggest improvements: speed up computation, expand robustness and flexibility, design an attractive user interface for desktop or web aligned with your brand, or add sensitivity analysis, scenarios, uncertainties, or optimization. We specialize in solving tricky problems and helping your team overcome roadblocks.
Custom tool development
If you want to lighten the load on your analytics team, avoid the expense of hiring another developer, or benefit from our subject matter expertise, Lumina will build you a custom decision application. We’ll work with you to clarify stakeholder priorities and sensitivities and identify key objectives, decisions and uncertainties. We will build the tool to meet these requirements, populate it with data, train your staff, and leave you with a decision tool customized to your specific needs.
Custom analysis
Perhaps you don’t need an in-house tool, but just need analytic results and recommendations. We will partner with you to design an effective decision framework. We’ll build the model and iterate with you to refine it. We’ll run the model for key scenarios, summarize the key insights, and provide any additional documentation or support.
Leverage Lumina’s flagship applications
Lumina has created a suite of decision tools spanning a range of industries. Examples include R&D portfolio management, economic analysis of heat pumps, energy storage, electric vehicles, distributed energy generation, and risk management for gas distribution and transmission. You can achieve significant cost and time savings by adapting these existing tools to meet your needs. Clients can license these tools for in-house use or rely on Lumina to perform analyses for you. Either way, the tools will be customized to your unique objectives.
Tailored Analytica training
Lumina offers Analytica training courses, online or in-person, which we can tailor to the specific needs of your team to supercharge your analytical capabilities. The education and use-case-relevant libraries and examples you’ll acquire will increase your proficiency, save you time, and improve the quality of insights from your decision tools.
How are contracts structured?
We are glad to structure engagements to align with your organization’s preferences. Options include fixed-fee, à la carte, or time-and-material with not-to-exceed amount agreements. Contracts can include a mix of consulting tasks and tool license fees. When we provide you with a decision application for in-house use, we can include the license in the consulting fees or treat it as a one-time or annual license fee. Ownership rights to the tools can remain with the client, be shared jointly between Lumina and the client, or stay with Lumina while offering usage rights to the client. In no case will Lumina own or reuse any of the client’s proprietary data that populates the tool. We can provide tools as fully editable, including underlying logic and equations, or limit them to changing input data and configuration settings at your option.
Learn more
To book or learn more about our consulting services, contact Solutions@Lumina.com.
See examples of how Lumina has helped other organizations by clicking through previous case studies.
Meet our consulting team leads
Our Lumina team has extensive experience in developing decision tools using a variety of methods, including systems dynamics, scenario analysis, sensitivity analysis, Monte Carlo simulation to treat uncertainty, optimization and more. We also have experience on projects in private and public sectors with multiple stakeholders. Our team received the Decision Analysis Practice Award from the Society for Decision Professionals for the Rigs to Reefs project.
James Milford heads Lumina Consulting Services. James has more than fifteen years of experience using Analytica for energy and environmental modeling research and consulting. Most recently, James was Co-founder and Director of Technology at Lumidyne Consulting. Before that he was a Managing Consultant in Guidehouse’s (formerly Navigant) Energy Practice. At the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, James led a multi-million-dollar project with six other National Labs and Lumina to build the Stochastic Energy Deployment System (SEDS), an Analytica model to help the US Department of Energy (DOE) manage its portfolio of R&D projects and project their long-term effects on energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions.
James holds an MS in Engineering and Technology Management from the Colorado School of Mines and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado. Outside of helping clients design and build the best analytical tools, James is often searching for outdoor adventures…or simply trying to keep his lawn mowed.
Karen Lee is a Senior Consultant Analyst at Lumina with 5+ years of experience in policy consulting and policy communication. Prior to joining Lumina, Karen worked at the RAND Corporation on a variety of consulting projects, from building simulations to web development and communications design.
Karen has a PhD in Policy Analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School, an MSc in Operations Research from the London School of Economics, and a BS in Decision Science from Carnegie Mellon University. In her spare time, Karen likes to go on walks with her dog and read books.
Hadi Eshraghi is a Senior Consultant at Lumina and has nearly a decade of experience developing energy models in both the academic and consulting settings. Hadi joined Lumina in June 2021 after leaving his prior role at PA Consulting Group. Throughout his professional career, Hadi has had the opportunity to work with many energy models such as LEAP, MESSAGE, OSeMOSYS, Temoa, Aurora, and Analytica. For the most part, Hadi’s work has been focused on using energy models in the context of clean energy transition.
Hadi holds a BS in mechanical engineering and a MS in energy engineering from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. He received his Ph.D from North Carolina State University in 2020. Before leaving academia, Hadi was a post-doctoral research scholar at North Carolina State University. Hadi’s most favorite activities are playing soccer and long-distance road trips.
Ben Filstrup is an Associate Consultant Analyst at Lumina. His main responsibilities are model development and client satisfaction. This can include converting models to be cloud-ready (ACP), implementing feature requests, and facilitating conversation between clients and the development team. He is also responsible for helping improve Analytica through library development, assistance in bug tracking, and the creation of training materials and documentation. Some of his current improvements are related to SQL and interactive mapping features.
Ben holds an MA in Applied Economics from San Jose State University and a BS in Computer Science from UC Santa Cruz. In his spare time, Ben enjoys rock climbing.