The Issue You Tackled

TeleComputing, now called Visolit, is a leading provider of centralized IT operation services, based in Norway. The project developed a System Dynamics model that would enable continuing estimation of the point in time at which the processing capacity limit of the company’s data center in Oslo would be reached.

The work was done in close cooperation with the Chief Technical Officer of the company, with regular in-depth meetings where model progress and results were presented and potential improvements discussed.

What You Actually Did

The model includes a relatively detailed representation of the development and growth in the company’s main assets, namely servers and storage spindles, and shows how the company’s growth objectives, together with its service level and inventory policies, lead to the historic and likely future growth patterns in its assets. Once the model was shown to replicate the observed behavior patterns for the right reasons, it was used to test future business development scenarios, and plan future investment in data-center capacity, valued at many millions of Norwegian Krone.

The Results

Previously, the likely future availability of processing power in the data center had been projected by using intuitive extrapolation. However, the model demonstrated that such extrapolations are completely misleading, because of a shift in the system’s behavior mode due to advances in technology. Consequently, the model fundamentally changed the company’s estimates concerning the project’s central question – when the limit of the data center capacity would be reached, and how much to invest, when, to ensure that capacity will continue to be adequate, but without excessive investment.

Development of the System Dynamics model also discovered faulty data, and led to the devising of useful time-charted performance indicators, which resulted in otherwise unattainable insights.

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Did You Know?

Updates on the case

The authors contacted the CTO of the company for follow up three years after their final deliverable. The positive and valuable outcomes that emerged throughout the project, together with the ability to see their business performance in a visual, structured and rigorous manner, led the client to engage with the project enthusiastically from the start. As he remarked “I can confirm that the projections [from the model] are definitely true. We now know that virtualizing the majority of our servers means there’s no need to expand the data center for the foreseeable future, as we had previously expected we would need to do!

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Although of substantial commercial value, this project was carried out as a requirement of the European Master in System Dynamics (EMSD) program at the University of Bergen, Norway, under the supervision of Professor Pål Davidsen.

The Issue You Tackled

Dell faced a challenge where the market adoption of their high-tech and smart predictive maintenance system, SupportAssist, was not at the desired level. SupportAssist has the capability to continuously receive data from millions of Dell devices globally, store it in the cloud, and predict the likelihood of failure in Dell devices through its intelligent engine. It is a useful tool that can prevent computer failures, which is especially critical in high-risk industries such as energy and healthcare. Despite all the benefits, SupportAssist was not gaining traction in the market.

What You Actually Did

We were engaged to develop a system dynamics model to analyze the market adoption and performance of Dell’s SupportAssist. Our models were built based on the past successful cases of system dynamics applications to market adoption problems, as well as expert knowledge from the field. Throughout the process with a duration of 2 years, the client was engaged and multiple iterations of the model were offered, utilizing various data sources from the company.

We validated the model by replicating past data from Dell and also developed a user-friendly interface using Forio that works as a flight simulator for decision makers. The interface allows decision makers to compare different strategies through “what-if” analysis, and can inform strategic decision making. In addition, our models were informed by supplementary statistical techniques and textual analysis of their archival data.

The Results

Our simulation models challenged the client’s mental model on several of their strategies, such as their focus on promoting evaluation, short-term marketing campaigns, retention of disconnected clients, and sole focus on design features and marketing resources. The model pointed to a major “leakage” in the pipeline of their customers. We offered a combination of strategies with a focus on mass penetration (few customers using SupportAssist in more devices) and periodic value generation beyond fixing failure. The benefits of the new strategies are estimated to be in the order of M over a period of 5 years.

In addition, the entire discussion around the model helped Dell to have a different dynamic perspective on the problem of market adoption, and promoted more effective dialogue within the organization.

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