DPL™

Determining strategic direction in today's business climate is a formidable challenge. As you navigate the competitive landscape you must choose the best path through an unprecedented array of opportunities and uncertainties.

Today's business professional can no longer depend on rules of thumb and yesterday's tried-and-true methods for making key decisions. As the business climate becomes more complex, you must have cutting-edge tools to augment knowledge and judgment.

Conventional tools such as spreadsheets are ill-equipped to handle the vast array of alternatives, uncertainties, and contingencies that characterize complex business decisions.

As the state-of-the-art tool for analyzing and making complex business decisions, DPL brings the power of decision analysis and Real Option Valuationä (ROVä) to your desktop. DPL helps you find your way through the multitude of possible actions and future options. DPL is the new generation decision making tool that addresses the dynamic nature of the decision environment.

DPL is quite simply the most powerful decision-analysis software available. DPL helps you identify and structure the decisions and uncertainties that characterize your competitive business environment and your specific decision situation. With DPL, you can see the pathways that define your future options. DPL's calculation engine analyzes and compares these pathways, identifies the value along each, and determines the optimum pathway. DPL's power enables you to focus on analyzing and understanding your strategy, so you can make the best decisions.

The easiest way to get the power of decision analysis on your desktop

DPL is easy to learn and easy to use. With DPL, you can move seamlessly from simple spreadsheet analysis to powerful decision analysis in no time because DPL creates the decision model from the spreadsheet model. Setting up the links requires only simple point-and-click commands.

DPL's more sophisticated capabilities are all accessible through its intuitive Windows-based interface. Context-sensitive help is with you every step of the way. DPL provides all the tools the business professional needs to construct and analyze decision models.

Building and communicating decision models

Expressing a problem accurately is the key to solving it. DPL combines the power of influence diagrams and decision trees in one package to help you describe your decision model precisely and completely.

DPL's influence diagrams define relationships among the decisions and uncertainties. Decision trees, on the other hand, articulate how the chronology of decisions and uncertainties unfolds in the future. Decision trees define what you know - and do not know - when key decisions must be made.

DPL allows you to define the consequences of your decision - sometimes called the value model - in either your spreadsheet or directly in DPL.

Analyzing decisions and developing insight

DPL's analysis features are second to none. They help you answer the most important questions:

WHICH FACTORS MOST AFFECT MY DECISION? DPL's tornado diagrams show the effect of varying inputs to the decision model. By showing you which factors have the most impact, DPL helps you build insight and prioritize your work. For more detailed sensitivity analysis DPL provides the ability to generate one-variable rainbow diagrams.

WHAT IS THE BEST DECISION? DPL's policy trees display every path along your tree graphically, identifying the best alternative at every decision point. You can zoom in or collapse nodes. Policy trees are a great way to communicate results.

WHAT IS THE RISK? DPL produces risk profiles - also known as cumulative probability distributions - that describe the range and likelihood of outcomes in your decision model. These profiles can be compared to better understand the relative risks of your decision alternatives.

DPL includes a vast array of advanced features to accommodate the demands of decision analysts, including advanced tornado diagrams, value of perfect information and control, conditional policy summaries, parameter sensitivity analysis, and project documentation features.

For the ultimate power user, DPL can convert spreadsheets directly into DPL code. By eliminating the need for a spreadsheet interface and using DPL's calculation engine, you will dramatically reduce model run times. Depending on the complexity of your model, you can increase calculation speeds by a factor of ten or more.

Technical Specifications

Model Building
INFLUENCE DIAGRAMS