Navigating Aerospace Decisions: How to Make the Right Choice Every Time
Strategic Decisions Group is in the business of enhancing business performance and instilling decision quality in organizations facing highly complex, long-term, costly investment decisions. These types of decisions are common in the aerospace industry, which routinely faces tremendous uncertainty and the regular entry of new competitors. With these characteristics and the many trade studies involved, decision quality has emerged as an essential tool for aerospace companies to successfully navigate in this market.
SDG pioneered the application of decision science to complex, uncertain business and commercial decisions, often with multiple parties and long time horizons. SDG first introduced decision quality (DQ) three decades ago, and it is now a standard framework for managing risk and uncertainty in capital- and decision-intensive organizations. Organizations adopting DQ see huge benefits, including:
- Measurably higher-value strategic options
- Faster, more timely, high-quality decisions
- Improved organizational alignment around major decisions
We offer a range of services that support organizational decision quality, tailored to each client’s specific needs.
The sections below provide links to SDG resources, including a downloadable paper with a case study, webinars on the challenges in aerospace as well as general introductions to decision quality and decision culture, and several case studies, including one featured in Harvard Business Review. Each includes a link to longer descriptions on our website.
Continue the conversation by reaching out to Robert Cone of our aerospace team.
Rising to the Challenge in Aerospace Today—Executive Summary
The aerospace industry is facing change across technologies, systems, and organizations. The volume of business opportunities is growing dramatically, with new technologies maturing faster than ever. The explosion of new companies and the capabilities they are offering is changing the competitive landscape. To succeed in this environment will require a sound approach to risk-informed decision making, one that helps in managing risk, considering all options, and capturing important opportunities. Download our executive summary and case study related to the challenges in aerospace.
Webinars on Demand
View replays of webinars related to aerospace decision making, risk management, and decision quality.
Rising to the Challenge in Aerospace Today
Today’s space sector is experiencing significant and rapid change, adding complexity and new factors that feed into decision making.
Risk Management 3.0: Moving from Compliance to Competitive Advantage
Traditional risk management often focuses on value protection, not value potential. There is a better way.
Decision Quality: How to Make the Right Choice the First Time
By learning to judge the quality of a decision before you make it, you can improve your skills no matter what your experience level.
Case Study | Aerospace Bidding Strategy Incorporates Uncertainty, Profit, and Competitor Activity
A major aerospace contractor to the US government was interested in exploring whether decision science could help it determine the optimal bidding strategy for high-tech specialty products. Competitive bidding of government contracts had become increasingly competitive as the US government implemented significant changes to its procurement process in order to rein in costs. The company intended to continue to bid on government contracts, but only those contracts would generate a reasonable profit to the organization. The company’s management team wanted to test an analytical approach that would combine the principles of decision science together with a “game theory” approach that would incorporate the potential strategies of competitors.
Case Study | Customer Perspective Prompts Engineering Company to Expand R&D Effort
A global engineering company faced uncertainty around a new technology under development—technology intended for a key product but with the potential to be applied elsewhere. The company had to decide whether to continue providing budget and resources toward development or to pull the plug. The project team keenly understood the technology, but had limited insight into the potential value it could generate in the market, or the commercial risks associated with implementation. SDG’s analysis incorporated a customer value perspective that had not before been considered, leading the team to conclude that the technology was not only more valuable than expected, but also must be repurposed elsewhere to make the strongest business case.
Additional Case Studies
SDG’s experience in tackling future uncertainty over long time horizons has made it an advisor of choice among many capital- and investment-intensive organizations. Here are additional case studies that might be of interest to decision makers in the aerospace industry.
- Manufacturer Adopts Flexible, Staged Approach to Optimize Capacity Expansion
- Search for Growth Strategy Reveals Most Promising Amid Rich Set of Opportunities
- Optimizing the New Product Development Portfolio with State-of-the-Art IP
- Embedding Decision Quality in Chevron’s Culture Helps Them Outperform the Competition
- This was the subject of a 2015 Harvard Business Review article, An Organization-Wide Approach to Good Decision Making
Questions? Comments? Contact Robert Cone to explore available options or learn more.
Robert Cone
+1 303.902.4350
rcone@sdg.com
www.sdg.com
