A Decision Support System for evaluating operations investments in high-technology business

Abstract

The evolution in the way that businesses approach markets has been a frequent literature topic in the last few years. In the high-tech industry, even the most successful companies have been mainly focused on the features of their products and processes, trying to develop their technology to gain a price/performance advantage, and thereby protect or increase market share. However, this approach is disconnected from their beliefs about what target customers really care about, nor does it is consider which of those underlying assumptions are most critical to business growth in share, revenue, and profit. This paper proposes a Decision Support System (DSS) to connect customer value to business targets, providing scenarios to show the customer responses and business results that will enable future funding, with optimization techniques to compare alternatives. The first step is for business planners to characterize their target market by formalizing what are often informal but deeply held beliefs about what drives their customers' purchase decisions. They create a list of attributes that together define customer value, the basis on which customers in the target market compare and select from competing products. With that attribute list, planners sometimes are able to go further and segment their market by grouping customers together who put top priority on the same attributes. This system dynamics model connects planned investments to expected improvements in the customer's perception of those critical attributes, (relative to the competition), and thus increase sales, revenue, and market share.