Making Better Decisions with the Support of Robust Decisions

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Better Decisions

Robust Decisions' products and services can help your organization to accelerate revenue, reduce costs, decrease risk and increase profit through making the best possible decisions — every time and in every situation.

Reducing the time, cost and effort involved with the management and fusing of information in a decision process, Robust Decisions helps increase confidence in mission-critical decisions. Further, the patented Bayesian Team Support™ (BTS™) methodology allows an organization to gather and track inputs from key stakeholders in a decision process. The BTS methodology then helps provide a clear understanding of possible outcomes for each of several decision alternatives.

BTS is proven methodology that enables you to make the best possible decisions in environments where there is a high-level of uncertainty and when decisions are (or should be) influenced by multiple team members. BTS also provides a framework for management to evaluate, understand and improve the processes used to reach decisions.

Reduce costs & accelerate revenue

A recent study of 400 business managers showed that an astounding 50% of the decisions made within organizations yielded poor results and did little more than simply waste valuable time and resources. What if these poor decisions could have been avoided?

The costs of a poor decision, no decision or a convoluted decision-making process can come in many forms, for example:

A management team realizes that a company re-organization is needed immediately to decrease expenses and cut losses. Drawn-out, hesitant and piecemeal actions of cutting payroll, who and when to let go, over several months might have effects on morale and create a work environment parallelized in suspense. An accurate analysis of the problem based on the BTS methodology, however, can be finalized within weeks.
A company needs to select a concept for a new product. It is early in the development stages and there is much uncertainty, but much riding on the decision. The distributed team needs to pool their knowledge, resolve important inconsistencies and make the best possible decision with buy-in from all parties. As the chosen concept develops, the team will need to make many trade-off decisions about detail features of it. As these features evolve, test, simulation and gut feel knowledge will need to be fused in real-time and presented so the best choices can be made.

Ability to meet some critical requirements will traded for good performance in others. All this can be managed and the most robust decisions consistently made with Accord.
A company has a failing product line. The manager has the choice to fix the problem by choosing one of several design enhancement options or eliminate the offering entirely. Multiple individuals and teams all have conflicting opinions and facts, each with its own merits. Bringing teams together in person to discuss the options would be costly, and may not necessarily lead to insightful conclusions. Worse, a highly controversial issue might spark antagonisms, politics, and resistance. The BTS tools and methods from Robust Decisions support a distributed 24/7 approach to survey each party involved for detailed inputs to the decision process so multiple voices are heard and weighed appropriately. This allows a holistic approach that ensures management has the highest-levels of confidence when making complex product-line decisions.

Empower Team Decision Processes Across the Enterprise

Business decisions at every level involve many people, most of whom do not just supply facts but offer expert opinions, predictions, and simply "gut instincts." For each additional person involved in a decision, the complexity rises accordingly. How can one evaluate facts, and the unique human elements that groups bring, without being stalemated? The BTS process together with the Accord™ software toolset provides a proven methodology for collecting, evaluating and acting on the consensus created by many individuals and teams involved in a decision. BTS relies upon the assumption that information used will be incomplete, uncertain, conflicting and evolving over time. Accord, supporting the BTS methodology, enables team members to provide their inputs without requiring face-to-face discussions or participation in lengthy decision-making meetings. Using the network-based Accord, individual feedback can be collected across a distributed environment, allowing the decision-manager to quickly understand, evaluate and weigh many divergent views and opinions. Teams and committees can actually become effective decision makers with Accord and BTS, empowering the organization to act decisively and with confidence.

Improve Time-to-Market

When there is uncertainty in product development with sourcing options, embedded technology alternatives or what materials to use, Accord and BTS allows a manager to discover, assess alternatives and decide quickly, even within a maze of complex information. The end result is that you can make a decision with confidence and bring products to market in less time and for less cost, with a higher potential for profit.

For example, a product development company may use Accord to support the selection of best concepts and product details. During conceptual design, a poor early choice can require an additional design iteration delaying release to market by three months. Not including the loss in market share because of late delivery, the additional costs of the engineering and support personnel alone is over $100,000.

Speed Decision Making

Accord from Robust Decisions aids in making the best possible decisions in the fastest time possible, including evaluating and assessing the information and opinions of many people who are involved. Accord leverages BTS to scientifically collect, assess and evaluate uncertain, conflicting and evolving information from all the experts in an organization. As evidence accumulates, the degree of belief in one of the alternatives will emerge as the best choice. To help bring this process to closure, BTS provides graphical and textual feedback to the teams and individuals to guide their deliberation.

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