Integrated Expert System
The integrated expert system extends the analysis and database functionality with easy-to-use mini-applications. Exploit them to better plan your IT investment and purchasing strategy.
Plan the years ahead
Investment in IT is a dominant part of the capital expenditure budget of many organizations. As a result, decision-makers are faced with tough questions: What are the IT investment alternatives? What are the expected costs? How should such investments be justified?
Intuition and experience are not enough for answering these questions in today’s rapid changing environment. In making your IT investment and sourcing strategy work, sound and clear-cut planning is the first and most important step since it lays the foundation for all subsequent management activities. The more responsible your position within an organization, the more time you should spend in planning. Benchum Decision will facilitate the planning process by providing the numerical data and analytical techniques to your possible approaches. Its expert system guides you step-by-step through the complex choices involved.
Mini-applications for budgeting and finance
The integrated, rule based expert system provides support and expert advice to certain classes of problems. It guides you to the solution through a number of questions that take the individual circumstances in your organization into account such as number of users, length of planning horizon, cost of capital, and others. The rule base is divided into mini-applications for well defined questions in selected fields of IT budgeting and finance. Each of these mini-applications shows how to assess a particular problem and adapt it to your individual situation. As such, the interactive expert system serves as a convenient user interface to the numerous built-in financial and statistical functions of Benchum Decision. It can assist your decision making by asking the relevant questions and explaining the reasons for adopting certain actions. It will provide you with the tools for evaluating and examining your different action alternatives — economically and without risks.
An expert system for better decision making
The core components of the expert system are the rule base, the inference engine, and the explanation subsystem.
• The rule base is a collection of rules in "condition-action" ("if - then") format. Each mini-application maintains its own unique rule base. This modular design facilitates keeping the rule base up to date and building new mini-application.
• The forward-chaining inference engine automatically determines which rules are applicable and searches for a robust solution.
• The explanation subsystem enables users to access several help and support information during the consultation process. The explanation can range from how the final or intermediate solutions were arrived and why the system is asking for certain information.
“Goal setting” and “what-if” functionalities allow users to test how to best improve the likelihood of success. It is often the case that the fullest understanding of all investment alternatives comes by calculating them and subsequently checking the results for sensitivity of key parameters. Benchum Decision is a powerful tool available for this purpose. It will speed up the usual procedure, improve the quality, and put you in the proper picture for deciding in advance what needs to be done.
Learn more about the financial and statistical functions.

More features of Benchum Decision.