Sophisticated organizations have built information systems, such as data warehouses, to process data to aid in decision-making. And while these help enormously, eventually executives wind up looking at canned reports of basically the same information. Like the dashboard on your car, these reports indicate what has been accomplished, what results the organization continues to achieve, and whether certain aspects of the organization are overheating, running out of fuel, etc.

After a while, the likelihood of this dashboard approach yielding additional insight to the business decreases. The real challenge becomes: how do we find unique opportunities to make changes in the organization? In other words, how do we find problems we don't know we have? This is the key question organizations should strive to answer.

Albert Einstein told us, "The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science."

When the problems are known, the solutions are typically straightforward.

Propel's focus is on increasing financial returns on invested or operating capital. Our approach includes exploring detailed operating data in novel ways, to identify unique opportunities to increase returns. That is, we identify unforeseen, opportunistic problems. Once this is done, the solutions are relatively easy - it's the problem that's the problem.