Until now, the PIMS experiences, a decision-support tool, was only available to members of the Strategic Planning Institute. pimsonline.com corrects this. The PIMS strategy experience is now available on line... so managers can explore for themselves the cross-industry experience of strategically-comparable businesses.

A web site accessing the experience of 3000 businesses in the PIMS database to help strategists answer two questions: What’s expected? and What if?
  

Here’s how pimsonline.com works:

PIMS researchers have:

• Identified key strategic questions.
  e.g. What level of profitability is expected?
  
  
• Identified factors which both micro-economic theory and the PIMS experience show drive results.
  e.g. market share rank

Business management:

• Selects a key question.
  e.g. What level of ROI (pre-interest/pre-tax Return on Investment) is expected for my actual/proposed business?
  
  
• Estimates the driving factors for this business.
  e.g. Our market share rank: #2.

pimsonline.com software:

• Uses these estimates as matching criteria to draw a sample of comparable businesses from the PIMS database.
  
• Reports the sample averages for a) the matching criteria and b) the matter in question.
  e.g. The 20 businesses in the sample were all ranked #2 and their average ROI was 18%.

Business management:

• Uses the insights to help develop and reality-test strategies.

  

Four key questions

To date, pimsonline.com software has been written to address four key questions:

1. What level of profitability is expected for this business?
   
2. What level of market share gain/loss is expected for this business?
   
3. What level of marketing expense is expected for this business?
   
4. How does this business rate as an opportunity for generating profitable growth?

  

And "What If?" questions

Of course getting the PIMS answer to a question like "What ROI is expected?" is only the beginning. Immediately we want to know what the ROI would be if we improved customer-perceived quality, invested in automation to reduce manufacturing costs, "bought" market share, etc. To explore these questions you simply need to describe the what-if scenario, re-estimate your ROI-driving factors and resubmit the question to the report.