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Simulationsbasierte Risikoanalyse von Businessplänen

Die Einschätzung zukünftiger Kosten, Gewinne oder Absatzmengen gehört zu den Alltagsproblemen von Entscheidern in Unternehmen. In der Planung werden Unsicherheiten häufig durch einfache Szenariotechniken abgebildet, die anhand von typischen Extremfällen einen Überblick über mögliche Entwicklungen erlauben sollen. Eine realistischere und präzisere Schätzung ermöglichen jedoch Simulationen, mit deren Hilfe sich eine Vielzahl von Entwicklungen und Szenarien auch unter Unsicherheit analysieren lassen. Das Projekt erforscht die praktische Anwendbarkeit simulationsbasierter Methoden zur Risikoanalyse für die Verbesserung von Businessplanungen insbesondere im Medienbereich. Das Projekt wird in Zusammenarbeit mit Karl Schmedders, Kellogg School of Management an der Northwestern University durchgeführt.

Ansprechpartner:
Prof. Dr. Armin Rott
E-Mail: a.rott@hamburgmediaschool.com

Kurzbeschreibung:
To a large extent, entrepreneurship relies on successfully predicting the future, the ability to determine the probability of selecting actions that will result in desired outcomes, and the ability to analyze alternatives in a manner that is most likely to lead to the best decisions.

Business planning means dealing with uncertainties and risk, such as:

  • What will the sales of the new product be?
  • How much will costumers pay?
  • What is the initial investment needed?
  • How long will it take to get customers and get paid?
  • When will cash flow reach breakeven?
  • How much will the actual costs be?
  • How long will development take?
To make these projections, information is typically gathered from different sources including such things as historic data, expert opinion, market research and the entrepreneur’s judgement. In most cases, the results of the data gathering are not single numbers but rather a series of ranges. In conventional business plans, much of this information is later lost when only “average” or “most likely” values are used for financial projections. At times, an effort to improve these estimates is made by creating three scenarios resulting in a base case, worst case or best case, even when it is well-known that these extreme cases are highly unlikely to occur.
When introduced to the new concept, practicioners are often skeptical about the benefits in preparing and communicating a business plan based on the simulation approach. This projects aims at overcoming this hurdle by showing managers situations where the application of this concept will enable them to:
  • Look at literally thousands of different scenarios simultaneously, determine possible outcomes, and estimate their respective probabilities
  • Make use of all the financial related information gathered
  • Identify the critical success drivers in a business plan through sensitivity analysis
  • Systematically perform contingency planning for the most uncertain portions of the financial projections
  • Communicate effectively with stakeholders about uncertainties in the assumptions
  • Add credibility to business proposals by explicitly and coherently addressing risk factors

Weiterführende Informationen

Literatur:
Rott, Armin; Schmedders, Karl: Spiegel Online, A Case on the Application of Monte Carlo Simulation in Business Plannung, Kellogg Case, erscheint 2007.