Non-financial aspects

Question

If you realize that financial aspect are the main parts of a case and decide to divide the case into financial aspects and non-financial aspects: What should non-financial aspects include? Usually when I do this, it becomes some sort of an other branch in which I just list everything that I can think of that might be of relevance. An example could be should a flour producing company invest in new technology that make us produce the same amount of flour by using half of the land we are using now? An additonal objective could be to save $10M the first year. In this I could probably list product, reputation (e.g. GMO), customer preferences etc... as non-financial aspects. Any ideas on how we can approach different problems in which it will make sense to look into non-financial aspects? Any general things we can list under non-financial aspects (such as e.g. product and customers)?

Answer 1

Hi Anon,

This is not a complete list, but a few more suggestions would be risk (always relevant) and any industry-specific non-financials e.g. patents or government regulation.

I suppose the question you need to be answering is, "what non-financial information could I gain to change my answer even if the financial branch looks promising?"

Hope that's helpful!

Kay

Answer 2

Hi,

You do not necessarily need a separate non-financial bucket. For example, when you are analyzing the competitors you can ask both for financial (Market size, growth rate, profits) and non-financial aspects (key capabilities, product quality, etc)

Best