IFPS
IFPS (Interactive Financial Planning System) was a financial modeling language created by professor Gerald R. Wagner and his students of the
IFPS was available for a variety of platforms, including
IFPS was eventually out-competed by spreadsheets.
IFPS was an essential financial model-development tool for long range planning and strategic planning, popular business practices in the 1980s. As an "English-like" language, IFPS made it very simple to express relationships among financial concepts without having to worry about sequential logic, as the program would figure out dependencies among variables. This allowed for simple creation of both financial and managerial accounting statements. I was fortunate to work with IFPS for over ten years as an analyst at Champlin Petroleum aka. Union Pacific Resources. I also attended seminars and conferences put on by Gerald Wagner and his team at EXECUCOM. I believe it was the rise of risk management in the commodity industries over "assumption-based" techniques like long range planning, rather than spreadsheets per se, which contributed to IFPS loss in popularity. [Edit by David Benepe]
References
- ^ Power, D.J. A Brief History of Decision Support Systems. DSSResources.COM, World Wide Web, http://DSSResources.COM/history/dsshistory.html, version 2.8, May 31, 2003.
- ^ COMSHARE BOOSTS UK ROLE WITH BUY OF EXECUCOM FROM MPSI, Computer Business Review, March 12, 1991