Scenarios

Scenario Engine: we recalculate the consequences of the variant before the decision is made. What happens if you change the price, opening hours or shift staffing.

• AURA THINKLevel
• IntelligenceFamily
• in AURA subscriptionBilling

Problem

The most expensive decisions in a small company are made by gut feeling and tested on live experiments: we raise prices and see what happens; we cut hours and see what happens. The answer comes after a month along with the bill, and even then it's unclear whether it's due to the change or just a different month.

What we do

We recalculate the variant before you implement it: we take the forecast, sales history, costs and schedule and show how your 'what if' changes the result.

• You describe the variant in human terms — price, hours, shift, promotion — not with a formula
• Next to the variant there's always a 'we change nothing' version — without it there's nothing to compare to
• We also show what the calculation is based on so it can be challenged

What's included

Three elements; the last one is where trust in such tools most often breaks down:

• Set of variants you're actually considering, not a catalog of all possibilities
• Input data: forecast, sales history, costs and schedule
• Variant comparison with baseline along with the list of assumptions it's based on

Duration

The module doesn't run separately — it activates together with the AURA level. The start condition is the same as for the forecast: the scenario is calculated from the same data, so without sales history and costs there's nothing to recalculate. The variant itself calculates immediately once the data is there.

Cost

Scenarios are not ordered one at a time: each of them reads the same numbers as the rest of the system, and on its own it has nothing to calculate from. So the bill is for AURA in the venue, not for this screen. Its size depends on how deep the system has to reach — and that is only visible after going through your business.

Scenario Engine is included in the THINK level — the one where AURA explains why it turned out this way, what will happen next and what to do about it.

What you get

The conversation about change stops being a dispute about gut feelings. You can see how much the variant you're afraid of costs and how much the one you're heading towards gives — and the decision is still yours. Recorded assumptions have another side effect: after a month you can check which ones proved wrong.