Decision Support Systems – Rule Based Calculation

In Business Intelligence Systems, there are two general kinds of applications: Executive Information Systems, and Decision Support Systems. Executive Information Systems (sometimes known as Scorecards or Dashboards, depending on their graphical presentation) are designed to deliver specific key information to top managers at a glance, with little or no interaction with the system. A decision support system is an analytical application that permits the user to call up information from the data warehouse and manipulate it to derive actionable information.

For example, an EIS system might display three gauges: sales yesterday, sales this month-to-date versus goal for the month, and average sales per day this month. A manager looking at this data can determine if yesterday's sales were above or below average for the month, and whether they are on track for the month in total.

On the other hand, a Decision Support System allows the user to slice and dice that information and see what product lines are lagging or leading in sales, in what locations, and to bring in other information like available stocks, promotions, and competitive information that can explain why sales are lagging or leading. With that information, someone can make a decision to take corrective action.

Decision Support Systems often include features that allow the user to project how a business result would be affected if an underlying assumption were to change. For example, an investment decision might look less attractive if the company's cost of capital is driven up by an increase in the federal funds rate. The Decision Support System could calculate the cost and the return on investment in several scenarios.

Decision Support Systems can be thought of as a model of a business process. It gets some of its data from an underlying data warehouse, but the end result is a calculation based on the rules that govern that process. Some of the rules are known by the people who manage the process, but sometimes predictive relationships are found as a result of analyzing history. When these relationships are captured as an algebraic expression or an algorithm, and made part of the Decision Support System, they can be used to predict the impact of changes in controllable factors on the business process results, which are generally not controllable.

The Worcester Group, Inc. has been developing Decision Support Systems for over a decade. We can help companies like yours understand the factors that are affecting your business, and improve your bottom line by delivering actionable information to your desktop. We'd like to tell you more.