What's New Across Visual Decisions This Week (June 7, 2026)

ValueMaps grew up this week: group your initiatives into programs, gate them on cost and time, compare them, and walk out with the procurement spec to act on it

Last week valuemaps.com launched as an audit walk and a single saved scenario: pick a portfolio of use cases, score it against a real financial baseline, trace every dollar back to the data. This week it became the rest of the tool. You can now group scenarios into programs and portfolios and run an investment gate over them (de-confliction, marginal value, cost, time, and dependencies), compare them side by side, see the operational KPIs they move alongside the EBITDA, and generate the actual deliverables a buyer takes to a vendor and to their own team. The ExampleCo worked example now runs end to end across all three sites with PDF export, and the financial model underneath got a real chart-of-accounts rework.

It was a big week. Here is the shape of it.

From one scenario to a portfolio, with a real investment gate

A single scenario answers "what is this initiative worth?" The harder question is "what is worth doing together, and in what order?" That is a portfolio question, and it is the intellectual core of the value story.

You can now bundle initiatives into a program or portfolio and run a gate over the group. The gate produces the three numbers a CFO actually argues about: the sum of the standalone values, the de-conflicted joint value (two initiatives that both improve the same line do not get to claim the overlap twice), and the joint value allocated back to each initiative pro rata. Then it adds the two things a simple sum never has:

Marginal value. Leave-one-out, plus a greedy gate ordering that approves the highest marginal-net-value initiative next and marks the point where approving more starts destroying value.
Cost. A one-time investment, a payback, an NPV discounted at a cost-of-capital hurdle, and an ROI. The gate ranks net value, not gross benefit.

Members are scenarios, so the workflow is now coherent end to end: list, then initiative, then audit walk, then scenario, then program. A program member is just a saved scenario plus the two things it lacks, cost and timing.

Cost, time, and dependencies: the investment case stops being a single number

A gate is only honest if the cost side is honest. Three pieces landed this week:

Cost, de-duplicated at the thing you actually buy. If twenty use cases across five plants all need the same MES, you buy the MES once. Cost is priced at the procurement unit (the solution platform when one covers the capability, the individual enabler otherwise) and split once across everyone who shares it. A shared shop-floor network or MES is funded once, not once per initiative.
Time and phasing. The flat annuity became a per-year cash-flow stream. Each initiative's benefit ramps in, its investment phases over the deployment window, and de-confliction is recomputed per year so two initiatives only discount each other in the years they are both live. NPV discounts the phased net cash flow; payback is when cumulative cash actually turns positive.
Dependencies, first pass. A high-level prerequisite layer: the shop-floor network before the machine vision that rides on it. An initiative cannot start until its prerequisites are live, the gate schedules earliest-start accordingly, and it flags any cycles.

Cost-of-capital is a lever, defaulted to 10% so it reads as a real CFO hurdle rate, sitting alongside maturity and NPV horizon.

Compare scenarios, compare programs

Pick 2 or 3 scenarios, or 2 or 3 programs, and see them head to head. Programs compare on NPV, discounted payback, joint EBITDA, the de-confliction haircut, total investment, and how many members clear the gate, all at one uniform financial frame so the comparison is fair. Scenarios compare on EBITDA, P&L shape, and maturity sensitivity. Every comparison also surfaces selection overlap (the shared use cases and a Jaccard score): high overlap means the value mostly double-counts, low overlap means it is largely additive. That is something only a tool that owns the selection layer can show you.

KPIs alongside the dollars

valuemaps could already tell you a scenario lifts EBITDA by $X. Now it also tells you which operational KPIs move and by how much: throughput, scrap, OEE, on-time delivery, rolled up by SQDCI with a per-KPI drill-down. Same math chain, surfaced one step earlier. Flip any scenario into the operational view to see it.

The deliverables: the spec you procure, the plan you run, and the business case you present

This is the part that turns analysis into action. A value map now generates three frozen deliverables, each a saved, editable, exportable snapshot, gathered under a new Deliverables area:

The URS / URD (User Requirements Specification): the vendor-facing procurement spec. A full 19-section document with structured functional requirements and testable acceptance criteria, generated per solution, per scenario, or per program (one spec per budget line, per site). The URS now also emits an i3X interoperability output, so the spec aligns to the CESMII interoperability framework that integrators will be measured against, rather than leaving integration to chance.
The Implementation Readiness Brief: the internal project set that supports the rollout. Where the URS is what you buy, the Readiness Brief is the non-technology work you own (the process, the standard work, the organizational change), framed as A3s and driven by the residual, non-software side of the value attribution.
The Value-Map Report: the CFO business case, the frozen financial story behind the number.

Each one can be generated, edited, renamed, duplicated, and exported to PDF.

ExampleCo, end to end, with PDF export

The ExampleCo worked example now runs across all three sites: mfg-surveys shows the maturity-gap signature, mfgusecases turns it into a use-case roadmap, and valuemaps scores that roadmap against a baseline and rolls it up across all eight ExampleCo entities (corporate, two divisions, five plants), each plant against its own baseline so the total is a true sum. The valuemaps demo carries the full investment gate (de-confliction, cost, payback) and new Sankey visualizations of where the value comes from. And every part of the ExampleCo story, on all three sites, now exports to a clean, branded PDF: a cover page plus the content, formatted as a report rather than a screen dump. It is built for the CESMII Smart Manufacturing Executive Council showing.

Behind the scenes

A lot of foundation moved this week under the user-facing surfaces.

Chart-of-accounts rework. The math engine's treatment of sub-account baselines had been silently inflating Revenue-side contributions by 5 to 10x wherever a measure linked to an adjustment-style line, because those lines inherited a fake even-split of the parent account. They now compute against the parent account and an addressable share, sub-accounts distribute by share rather than guesswork, and each line exposes upper and lower response bounds (how far to trust the model on the upside versus the downside) tunable per baseline. The baseline form shows the full sub-account breakdown and the conversion constants behind each line.
Survey results, explicitly in the math. Benefit now scales to each use case's real, per-use-case maturity from the surveys, not a plant average, and you can see how your maturity moves the number. A below-benchmark plant has more headroom, so it captures more from the same program. The link from a survey answer to a dollar of impact is now explicit and inspectable.
A snapshot from a snapshot. Baselines and scenarios stay immutable by design. To iterate, you now duplicate a baseline (it pre-fills every value and every tuning from the source) instead of starting over, which keeps the immutable-snapshot contract intact.
CRUD cleanup across the board. An audit of create, edit, and delete coverage across Lists, Initiatives, Baselines, and Scenarios closed the real gaps: delete a baseline, rename an initiative, and new-list / new-initiative buttons where they were missing.
Lists got its own home. Your saved lists moved out of a tab on the account page to a proper /lists page.
Company visibility to the value outputs. For a multi-plant company the work is no longer siloed to whoever created it. Anyone in your company can now view your deliverables and analyses across the whole corporate-and-plant hierarchy, while editing stays with the owning site. A plant sees the corporate view; corporate sees the plants.
Smaller cuts. The valuemaps home page lost its two competing entry paths for a single clear one, and the /analyze page dropped the now-redundant cross-link back to mfgusecases.

Coming soon

The deliverables engine has the next refinements queued: tuning how aggressively the URS marks sections not-applicable to a given solution (right now it is too generous and includes more than it should), and industry-specific overrides for the requirement library so a food plant's spec reads differently from an aerospace shop's. On the platform side, finishing the cross-site invitation flow so inviting a colleague straight into valuemaps is a one-click path.

Questions, feedback, or want to walk a portfolio through the gate 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