I was in Europe recently and had the opportunity to meet with a relatively new company, SmithBayes.
SmithBayes models a business in the same way that SimCity models a city. I've been intrigued by this approach ever since a full-day meeting with a large European oil company a few years ago. As the company described its business as an interlocking set of assets, each with its own inputs, outputs, constraints and risks, I couldn't help but think of the family of Sim Games. When will it be possible to model a company that way, and test the possible outcomes of various strategies and risks at a deeper level than, but with the immediacy of, a spreadsheet?
Maybe soon.
SmithBayes technology was developed initially by McLaren to develop strategies used in Formula 1 racing organization, and was later applied to a broader range of business simulations. The MBO from McLaren was completed in January 2007 and the story was picked up by a number of business articles including this one from the Financial Times.
In SmithBayes' tool, Objects represent business assets or operations with properties such as capacity and costs. Objects can be combined visually, and have properties set based on real business data.. Combinations of objects can model business strategies and outcomes, and identify critical components and confidence levels. Business analysts can define multiple complex scenarios and SmithBayes will use sophisticated analytics such as Monte Carlo simulation to identify the most likely outcomes (and confidence levels) from each.
SmithBayes’ modeling approach is augmented by a rich set of visualization tools that facilitate the comparison of different strategies. It acts as a decision platform and can embed 3rd party content or analytics to update these strategies over time.
Maybe we'll see SimBusiness soon.
