Headline: valuemaps.com is live, the Action Plan ships alongside the URD, and Initiatives carries selections across all three sites
Summary: A third platform site launched this week. valuemaps.com takes a curated portfolio of use cases (yours, picked on mfgusecases) and scores it against your company's real financial baseline, with every dollar of impact traceable back through a specific measure and a specific finance line. Audit-walk first, CFO-facing waterfall second. Plus the Action Plan V2 that was the headline of last week's Coming Soon list, and a new shared concept called Initiatives that carries a buyer's selection from one site to the next.
valuemaps.com is live — the third site
The mental model: a value map is a portfolio of operational improvements scored against a real financial baseline. The math chain is named (use case → measure → finance line → EBITDA), every link is inspectable, and the audit walk shows every contribution back to the raw data the engine consumed. No black boxes; nothing the CFO can't challenge.
How it composes:
- Baselines. Capture your company's financial state at the account level. Industry-typical defaults pre-fill at your revenue scale (we maintain hundreds of industry × finance-line typical baselines). Override the accounts where you have actuals. Save as an immutable snapshot the math runs against.
- Audit walk on /analyze. Pick a portfolio (capabilities, use cases, or an Initiative carried over from mfgusecases), set the scenario constraints, and trace every link from a measure to a finance line to an EBITDA contribution. Outliers flagged. Every intermediate the engine applied is visible.
- Saved scenarios. The audit walk plus a baseline plus a named portfolio, saved as a reloadable, shareable artifact. The new /scenarios/[id] page leads with the headline EBITDA, a finance-line waterfall, a Sankey "where the value comes from," the top contributing use cases, and the key assumptions. The Sankey is the visual the page is built around: a three-column flow from capability to use case to finance section, color-coded by Revenue lift, COGS reduction, and OpEx reduction.
Accounts are shared with mfgusecases. Sign in once, use both. The compute is Pro-gated; the surface is open to any signed-in user.
- The full toolkit lives on valuemaps.com. Build a baseline, save scenarios, share them with your team or your CFO.
The first user of the surface was us, running the data-quality audit. V2.0 is intentionally audit-first; CFO-facing exports come in V2.1.
Link: valuemaps.com.
Action Plan — the deliverable you can start this week
Last week's note ended with the Action Plan as the Coming Soon item. V1 from that week didn't land; intervention type was the wrong axis, taxonomy was not suggestions, and the whole thing got pulled Sunday night. V2 shipped Monday morning with a sharper frame:
URD = what you procure. Action Plan = what you can start doing immediately, no purchase needed.
Five suggestions on every list and every demo plant: 2 quick wins (small effort, top by impact) + 3 high-leverage (any effort, top remaining). Hard cap, no scrolling fatigue. The surfaces are the /lists/[id] tab (slot 2, between Use Cases and Enablers), every shared list page, and the /demo/[companySlug] accordion (open by default, sitting before the URD Draft).
The 100 non-technology canonical enablers that drive the suggestions each got a freshly-written "Start this week" action starter. The prompt was locked after a 10-row calibration sample for voice and opening-verb variety, so the LLM doesn't fall back to "Schedule a 90-minute session" boilerplate. Each card carries category + intervention chips, qualitative effort + horizon chips (no fake numeric precision; regulatory items bump to medium), the raw impact + % of plan with a tooltip explaining the math, and a footer noting how many use cases on the list the action underpins.
The same impact engine ranks both the Action Plan and the URD. @mfg/impact-scoring was extracted as a workspace package on Monday so the two deliverables speak the same language. URD now ranks solutions by weighted list impact (not canonical sort_order); capabilities within each archetype sort by weighted impact for monotonic display.
The buyer now walks away with two complementary deliverables, not one. URD is the multi-month vendor track. Action Plan is the this-week track. That's the answer to "vendor evaluation takes months and we need to move now."
Initiatives — the connective tissue across the three sites
A new shared concept. An Initiative is a buyer's saved selection of Solutions, capabilities, and use cases. Pure intent: no baseline, no math. Curated on mfgusecases (a Save as Initiative button on /explore/solutions and /lists/[id]), consumed on valuemaps (the /analyze Selection panel surfaces a "Load from one of your initiatives" picker when the selection is empty).
Mental model: an Initiative is what the buyer is trying to do. A Scenario (on valuemaps) is the Initiative plus a baseline plus the math — the CFO-facing output. Two distinct concepts; the Initiative is upstream of the Scenario.
Behind the scenes
A few foundational items shipped this week that don't need a headline but are doing real work behind the user-facing surfaces.
- Measures Layer V1 on mfgusecases. 367 canonical measures plus a KPI junction table, landed Monday in five staged chunks. The measure layer is the linkage between an operational improvement and a KPI movement, and the same layer valuemaps' math engine consumes downstream to score a use case's financial impact. The public /kpis page now shows the calculation for each KPI alongside the description.
- N-scaled aggregation across both sites. Two weeks back's "scaled gap-rule threshold" item shipped Monday. Per-subsection N curve: strict 4.0 / 2.5 at N=2, softens to 3.5 / 3.0 at N≥15. Single-voice flags surface separately and never feed curation. Now used by generateGapList plus both demo surfaces plus /account/company, so gap detection is finally the same code path everywhere.
- @mfg/admin extracted. Shared admin chrome plus cross-site feedback rollup early Sunday, then complete company-admin extraction (members, invites, plant tree, domains) by afternoon. Nine admin pages migrated across the two existing apps. valuemaps got the same admin surface for free on launch day.
- Top-bar rationalization on mfgusecases. The top nav was up to seven items and felt cluttered. Collapsed to three plus admin: Explore (Browse + Find tools + Libraries), My work (Lists + Initiatives, with the three most recent of each lazy-loaded into the dropdown), and Resources (Guide / Blog / ExampleCo / Take Assessment).
Coming soon
Two refinements queued for next week, both on the valuemaps side:
- Further work on the financial model, particularly the adjustment-vs-stock math (capital and inventory baseline lines need a different treatment from the operating-flow lines), and a calibration sweep on the per-line tanh dampening asymptote. The valuemaps audit Phase D + E this Saturday produced a clear punch list; this is working it down.
- KPI impact alongside financial impact. Today valuemaps tells you "this scenario lifts EBITDA by $X." Next: also tell you "and the KPIs it moves are throughput +Y%, scrap −Z%, OEE +W pts." Same math chain, just surfaced one step earlier. The Measures Layer V1 work this week is what makes this trivial to build.
Questions, feedback, or want to walk through valuemaps with your CFO? Reply to this email, or hit the Feedback button on any of the three sites. We read everything.
— Tim Stuart, Visual Decisions