Decision Support Practice

Business managers constantly make decisions that are intended to make their companies more productive.  To make these decisions managers depend on their experience, creativity, and intuition.  However, as the business environment becomes more complex, the decisions that managers make are rapidly becoming more complex as well.  Decision support software provides you with organized, quality information that you can bring to bear on these questions.

Our decision support practice focuses on creating technology that improves your ability to make informed managerial decisions.  We build software that helps you plan, direct, organize, and control your business functions.  Our decision support engagements include:

• A Balanced Scorecard application that allows any organization to create as many performance scorecards as they wish, based on as many distinct scorecard templates as necessary.
• A set of tools for automating the volume plan for a complex multi-tier logistics supply chain.
• A tool for setting inventory safety stock levels for a complex partially discrete and partially continuous flow manufacturing supply chain using both optimization and simulation approaches. The tool also generates sensitivity analysis in Excel spreadsheets, complete with charts, that managers can manipulate on their own.
• A geographical analysis of logistics what-if scenarios, including associated data analysis, analysis models, and visualization on color-coded maps showing possible stock locations, shipping lanes, and the like for alternative numbers of tiers, possible hub locations, and the like.
• A spacial grid model of the components of the logistics costs to serve any 10-square mile cell in the United States, given existing warehouses, transportation lanes, real estate costs, activity-based costs, and the like, complete with unlimited color-coded "heat" maps.
• Customer segment scorecards summarizing, for each segment, key metrics for the most recent snapshot in bar charts, across time in time series charts, and in a matrix table.
• And many others...

Of course, in many ways, "Decision Support" is a very broad concept, sometimes viewed as encompassing all information systems that are not aimed at actually running operations. Certainly our Decision Support work includes our work in Data Visualization, Data Mining, and our other "Analysis" practice areas.