Portfolio Management & Decision Support Systems. Fact based decision making.

Make sure your key decisions are based on sound scientific foundations

Commercial success relies on making the right decisions. Complex information may be available, but with no obvious interpretation. Tessella provides custom made processes and tools that bring structure and clarity. Our decision network approach gives the decision makers critical insight into their data.

Tessella has developed systems to support key decision making processes in very different industries including:

Portmanto

Developing new drugs is a time consuming, expensive, risky process. It can take ten years and $1 billion to bring a new drug to market, and most potential drugs discovered never make it. The vast cost and resources required means that it is usually impossible for a company to take forward all the potential drugs it discovers, and hence decisions need to be made about which to drop. It is crucial to the long term success of a pharmaceutical company that the right decisions are made, but often these decisions are based on incomplete, inconsistent and, potentially, incorrect or unavailable data. Tessella’s aim is to give pharmaceutical companies the tools and support needed to make better informed portfolio management decisions.

We build customized solutions using modules from our Portmanto toolkit; this is a suite of portfolio analysis programs that have been developed and used over a number of years.

Decision Support

Tessella has developed a Decision Support System for Metronet BCV, who are responsible, under a Public Private Partnership, for managing the infrastructure assets of four London Underground lines, such as the Bakerloo line.

It is essential that these assets – stations, signalling, tracks and tunnels – comply with the relevant regulatory constraints on safety, both during and at the end of the 30 year period of the partnership. To ensure this, Metronet needed a system to help their managers identify and then justify the most cost effective strategies for smart and efficient asset maintenance.

The new Decision Support System takes real data about the current state of the assets, and then applies a variety of “deterioration rules” to forecast the future condition of those assets over time, and how that condition will be affected by future maintenance or replacement. The managers can readily configure these deterioration rules, and examine the effects of any number of factors such as stress, load, or location, or restrict the investment strategies produced by applying caps on expenditure.

In addition, dependencies between nearby assets, and the benefits of renewing groups of assets together are all handled. Importantly, the process is completely interactive; this allows the Metronet asset manager to understand, and therefore communicate to senior managers and regulators, how the system arrives at the final recommendation and ensures both safety and value for money.

Roadmapping

The concepts used in Decision Support Systems are directly applicable to developing roadmaps; statements of the future direction of a research or development programme.

Possible future developments and their pre-requisites generally form a network naturally.

The costs, durations, probabilities and returns are attached to these. “Returns” are often qualitative rather than more straightforward financial returns, for example:

  • Prestige
  • Applicability to overall goals
  • Benefit to external considerations

Tessella’s approach to roadmapping allows insights such as:

  • Risk vs. return on investment
  • Expected results (including probabilities of failure) vs. best case results
  • Optimization of resource allocation over time
  • Quantified uncertainty on risks, returns, timescales etc