CASA: A knowledge-based tool for management consultants

The objective of strategic management consultant work is a comprehensive evaluation of the ethical values of the management, the capabilities of the employees and the performance of the administrative systems in order to develop a well-suited corporate strategy. In order to fulfill all these requirements the management consultants have to take into consideration several hundred data. The human information processing capacity allows in such situations only the intuitive and condensed assessment of the strategic corporate status quo. The knowledge-based system CASA (Computer Aided Strategy Audit) assists the management consultant during the process of enterprise segmentation in order to create strategic business units, the analysis of the corporate culture, the assessment of market and competition, and the strategic cost situation. The system is used now since the CeBIT fair 1989, and includes: 5-MB code and help texts, 2000 rules in 44 knowledge bases and 200 pages of automatically generated reports and up to 100 business charts. The use of CASA reduces the costs for the management consultancy to 30% of the original costs, i.e., from $75,000 to $25,000 for a strategy development project.