Helping Business Leaders Make The Best CapEx Decisions

Get the best options on the table.

The best options should challenge your capital strategy and how it’s operationalised. They’ll ultimately lock in the future return of your CapEx investment and prove the rationale behind all decisions.

But the best options are difficult to discover. You need rich data, robust predictions about the future and modelling that helps shape the optimal technical and business solutions.

Conviction that your decision will stand the test of time.

Decisions no longer get critiqued against standard business cycles of 3-5 years.

With faster communications, increasing access to data and the immediacy of social media, you’ll face scrutiny as conventional wisdom and intuition is constantly challenged.

The decisions you make today will have to be defended tomorrow and over the next 20 years.

Clear, precise, actionable decisions.

No business leader should be comfortable signing off on major CapEx decisions using assumptions and data that isn’t clear, robust or precisely defined.

Decisions should be made within a single unifying, comparative framework, comparing ‘apples to apples’ to translate technical nuances back into the pointy end of business impact.

On average, CapEx programs are destined to under perform by at least 20%

In most cases, this is due to at least one of the following problems.

  • Too many assumptions have been made without appropriate scrutiny.

    Assumptions are made at every level, often not intentionally, so they slip through unchallenged. It could just be an internal bias to keep doing things a certain way. It’s often just different experts seeing the world through different lenses, with different objectives and outcomes. Or the parameters of today are assumed to be fixed. There’s gold to be found when assumptions are brought to the surface and challenged, unlocking a different perspective that leads to different opportunities and optimised solutions.

  • There hasn't been a rigorous challenge to the constraints or scope of the solution.

    Engineers deliver to precise engineering outcomes. But adding in imprecise variables and the many layers of future unknowns means that solutions become over-specified to mitigate the risk of falling short of future performance demands and results in excessive levels of redundancy. Over-specification adds complexity and cost, requires longer delivery times making the solution less able to adapt to future changes in the business environment. It’s exactly the opposite of what the business will be looking for over the coming years when inefficient supply chains and outdated project delivery systems will already present enough challenges. These technical decisions aren’t usually clearly visible to those working on the business side of the equation, but they need to be controlled as a business decision.

  • There hasn't been enough collaboration between the business leaders and engineers.

    In an ideal world, business outcomes, the operational plan and business model would be shaped in tandem with the engineering outcomes, each challenging and sharpening the other. These are two distinct sides to the equation that have to be tuned together. But since there isn’t enough ‘common language’ or understanding between the two sides, there’s very little collaboration or alignment in outcomes.

  • The business impact of assumptions, risks and technical nuances weren't clear in the options.

    Each option delivers different business outcomes, risks, assumptions, constraints, opportunities and probabilities. Typically, options presented to the business leaders are either over simplified or over complex and detailed. The result is the same, the key decision making criteria is obscured. Decisions are made without decision makers properly understanding the assumptions made. The wrong choice is made and future scrutiny may leave them unable to defend the decision. Options must always be designed to clearly and accurately frame the business impact using consistent and comparable criteria so each can be reliably weighed and compared.

Which is where we come in.

We straddle the gap. We integrate the business and engineering aspects of your planned CapEx program with our experts coming from both sides of the equation.
We are independent. We push beyond agendas and the smoke and mirrors that threaten the viability of the CapEx proposal presented.
We get you a better result. Our systems and approach inject value into the project quickly, getting you the right result without slowing you down.

We provide an independent, expert perspective to assess the robustness of your CapEx proposal.

Our advice is based on an assessment across 4 key areas:

  • Identification of Red Flags.

  • Scope of underlying data used.

  • Robustness of models used for data analysis.

  • Testing of assumptions used in the recommended solutions.

The ROI of your CapEx depends on having the strongest set of options in front of you. It’s a process we’ll lead you through end-to-end, turning over every rock to see if there is a better way to get a result.

  • Everything gets challenged. The technical and engineering options as well as the business models. We ask the uncomfortable questions that you need to know the answers to.

  • We’ll enhance the options you have, but we’ll also work hard to discover better options that you’d likely never have thought of.

  • We’ll give you models that are precise, drawn from more comprehensive datasets, that layer in more dimensions of risk, constraints and variations of your operational playbook.

  • and importantly, you’ll have the data to defend the rationale for choosing one option over another.

Behind each option is a wealth of data and a complex modelling of risks, variables, assumptions, financial and performance metrics, and engineering implications.

Ultimately, this complexity has to be distilled so clear, accurate and defensible decisions can be made.

Good options are well designed, making them easy to compare, but not so simple that the nuances, assumptions and constraints aren’t clearly visible right at the pointy end.

Its an art form!

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RED FLAGS REVIEW

Preparing to finalise a major CapEx decision?

Our Red Flags Review is designed to quickly and efficiently cross-check any CapEx proposal in front of you now.

Red Flags is not a full in-depth validation. It’s a light touch pass across the models, data inputs, technical solutions used to support the proposal presented.

It may be a light touch, but in reality we are leveraging a set of indicators, questions and insights that we’ve developed over many years. It’s surprisingly efficient and sensitive at detecting problems like:

  • Critical assumptions that may have been hidden.
  • Engineering solutions that have been over-specified.
  • Insufficient datasets and dimensions used to build the analysis models.
  • Missed foresight into potential future scenarios.

We will highlight the major areas to improve the performance of your project… and we work quickly…
You’ll have a Red Flags Report on your desk within 7 days.

green-ellipse

A CEO’s roadmap for reducing CapEx wastage

The uncomfortable truths hiding in almost all CapEx proposals

  • Why conventional thinking isn’t working any more

    Discover why the world we live in today is causing even more uncertainty for businesses of all sizes and find out what you can do to minimise your risk.

  • What you aren’t being told and what to do about it

    Is your team too efficient at finding a seemingly easy solution? Do you feel that you are missing key decision markers? We discuss what to do when you want a solution but you want all the options on the table first.

  • 10 questions to ask engineers that uncover over-specification

    We give you the tools to spot the warning signs, challenge the assumptions, change the questions being asked and get the answers that you need.

Insights

We are continuously updating our Insights page with company updates, articles and industry wide information – take a look below.

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