Wednesday, BSG announced the acquisition of Houston-based Industrial Science. We are highly excited to have George Danner and Howard Park as part of the BSG Team - they are among the best in the business when it comes to building business simulations and have amazing depth and domain expertise in the area.

In the effort to fulfill BSG’s mission to lead the transformation to Next Generation Enterprises On Demand together with our customers, bringing business simulation capability into the BSG Platform was a necessary step. Industrial Science is a perfect fit for BSG, and will accelerate our ability to provide business simulation services to our customers - on demand.

As I move forward with my blog posts to generate discussion about defining a Next Generation Enterprise (NGE) and engage in discussion on all of the core capabilities of NGEs, Simulation On Demand will be the topic of one of these future posts. However, in discussing this acquisition I’m going to jump start some of the discussion of this simulation capability now.

Brian Mennel at the Austin Startup Blog had an appropriate quote in his announcement of this acquisition, which is highlighted below:

These days you can’t just walk in to corporate America as a consultant and offer advice, you have to posses a toolkit of readily deployable pieces that can add value quickly.

BSG is not a consulting company; we are in the business of NGE transformation, and provide a highly relevant suite of services to help drive that effort for our customers. We are rapidly assembling, both organically and through strategic acquisitions, an On Demand Platform of services for enterprises seeking to transform into NGEs. These services, whether strategic advisory services, custom web-based On Demand applications, or our own On Demand applications offered as a service, are to Brian’s point readily deployable, On Demand, to meet specific needs and drive immediate value for those embarking on the NGE transformation journey.

Providing a Simulation On Demand capability as part of the BSG Platform is critical to this NGE transformation effort. We have a strong point of view that having robust, visual, predictive simulations of core business processes will be a core capability of any NGE.

Why is Simulation On Demand a core capability for any NGE? Certainly it is for a lot of reasons, but here are a few critical ones from our viewpoint:

• The process of thinking about the details of a business process or operation that goes into developing a simulation is as or more important and insightful than the results of this simulation itself
• Basic business analytics look at what has happened, while simulations look at what might happen or what could happen depending on the changes across multiple variables, thus allowing for better predictive planning, and anticipation and understanding of potential issues and opportunties
• Visual simulation allows for the bridging of analytical information with the non-numeric business intuition of decision makers, providing the information and insight to allow for optimal decision making and communication of analytical insights throughout the organization and extended enterprise
• Simulations On Demand are tied into critical enterprise information technology infrastructure through service oriented architecture and web services, and thus are live simulations - allowing for agile responses to changing market conditions in an on demand manner
• Simulations On Demand can enable more robust and agile business partnerships, by allowing companies to simulate the economic models governing their business partnerships and alliances - this approach allows for greater transparency in business relationships and better opportunities for the business partners to propose, simulate, and implement new models which can benefit both partners in known and well understood ways

To further familiarize yourself with Industrial Sciences capabilities and prior work, look for BSGs news release and related links on our website today. Additionally, visit Industrial Science. In particular, you can view case studies and a sample demo of a simulation developed by Industrial Science at the links below:

• Case Study
• Demo

Now, on to that initial NGE series blog post.

^ brian