Planning for uncertainty with simulation and optimization
How companies can move beyond point forecasts by combining scenarios, predictive models and optimization to improve decisions under volatile conditions.
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Articles
How companies can move beyond point forecasts by combining scenarios, predictive models and optimization to improve decisions under volatile conditions.
Read articleHow stronger data foundations, governance and product thinking can turn fragmented information into a scalable source of decision advantage.
Read articleFocus
Advanced analytics should separate the factors behind performance rather than provide increasingly sophisticated descriptions of the outcome.
Analytical performance depends on representing the economics, constraints and relationships that actually determine outcomes within the sector.
Strategic challenges
Leaders often optimise several competing outcomes simultaneously, making trade-offs unavoidable even when the underlying analysis is strong.
Large data estates can continue expanding while important users still recreate datasets and struggle to find reliable information.
POV
Product investment should follow recurring demand and business relevance, not an ambition to turn the entire data estate into a catalogue.
If an external signal does not materially improve understanding or prediction, its novelty is irrelevant and its complexity is a cost.
Strategic impact
Objectives and constraints can be represented directly, allowing competing uses of resources to be evaluated within the same analytical problem.
Shared capabilities, methods and delivery patterns allow analytical capacity to expand without reproducing the same work across business units.
What we observe
We frequently see platform replacement prioritised before the business has determined which information capabilities actually need to change.
We frequently see sophisticated analysis applied to alternatives, objectives or assumptions that were never challenged at the outset.