Methodology

ForeTell helps you identify robust decisions.
 ForeTell's patent-pending methodology extends well-established scenario planning techniques with powerful "what-if" simulation and analysis capabilities for true decision support.

Our approach is highly pragmatic and straightforward. We define a robust decision as one that leads to favorable outcomes under a broad spectrum of possible future conditions. For example, a decision to increase production capacity is robust if it leads to sustained growth over time despite variations in demand, competition, and prices of raw materials.

Scenarios: How You Think the World Will Evolve
 You use ForeTell to define scenarios which capture the anticipated variations in your environment. You define these variations by making assumptions about trends such as inflation; economic forces such as differential costs of domestic vs. foreign outsourced production, and events, such as protectionist legislation or stock market crashes.

Alternate Decisions: How You Propose to Intervene to Influence YOUR Outcomes
 You also use ForeTell to define alternate decisions. In our manufacturing example, natural candidates would include: (1) expanding an existing plant; (2) building a new plant; (3) outsourcing production to a domestic or foreign producer; and (4) combining these approaches, for example, to outsource temporarily while you are building a new plant.

Metrics: How You ASSESS Decision Outcomes
 ForeTell solutions are instrumented with key performance metrics, which allow you to assess outcomes of your decisions. In our production example, ForeTell would define metrics such as market share, sales growth, cost per unit, production capacity and response time, profit, and return on investment.

Test-Drive and Compare Results
 You then use the ForeTell simulator to project the outcomes of each of these decisions in each of the scenarios that depict a plausible possible future. Finally, you use ForeTell's analytics to compare these outcomes and identify the one that leads to the most consistently favorable results.

 


Note: Analysts often like to weight the relative likelihoods of different scenarios. They then compute "expected values" of performance metrics using these weights to drive comparisons of decisions. It is straightforward to add this kind of analytic to your ForeTell solution.