A consulting recommendation—carried through to a board-ready decision

The recommendation being governed

Question: should the client commit to a second warehouse this quarter, or use a lower-commitment capacity intervention first?

The consulting team has a commercially plausible expansion case, but the recommendation creates a large fixed commitment and an expensive exit. AFOS treats that as a decision requiring evidence, explicit challenge, authorised sign-off and a scheduled outcome review—not as another presentation deck.

Evidence placed on the record

• Current cash runway: seven months at the present cost base.
• Existing warehouse utilisation: 94%; order backlog growth: 28%.
• Proposed site commitment: $480,000 annual fixed cost and $120,000 exit cost.
• Material evidence gap: backlog retention and a lower-commitment capacity option have not yet been measured.

Structured challenge and dissent

The expansion case is not dismissed: capacity pressure is real and delay could worsen service performance. The challenge is whether that evidence establishes a full second-site commitment as the best response right now.

The dissent retained on the record is that a short intervention may understate demand and delay a necessary expansion. AFOS preserves that objection rather than smoothing it into artificial consensus.

Representative human decision

• Do not approve the full lease this quarter.
• Authorise a 60-day overflow-capacity pilot capped at $60,000.
• Assign the operations lead to measure backlog retention, service level and utilisation each week.
• Return the lease recommendation to the authorised decision group after 60 days with updated runway and demand evidence.

Board-memo output

The generated memo names the decision, recommendation, material evidence, dissent, authority, actions, review date and unresolved gaps. An executive can read the conclusion without losing the reasoning trail behind it.

• Decision: defer the full second-site lease pending a bounded capacity test.
• Rationale: capacity pressure supports action, while current cash resilience and exit cost do not support the irreversible version yet.
• Dissent: a temporary intervention may delay an expansion that demand already justifies.
• Authority: final approval remains with the client’s authorised human decision group.
• Review trigger: 60 days, or earlier if service levels breach the agreed threshold.

Concrete outcome review—illustrative, not a customer claim

For this worked scenario, the 60-day review records that overflow capacity used $42,000 of the cap, utilisation fell to 86%, backlog fell 19% and cash runway remained 6.8 months. The decision group therefore continues the lower-commitment model for one more quarter and defers the lease.

The commercial value is not that AFOS predicted the answer. It is that the consulting recommendation, material objection, client authority, measurable experiment and reviewed outcome remain connected after the engagement moves on.

Common questions