Paid users can select up to 4 years of data for analysis, and, if you have paid for more than one business to analyse, you can click the + button to create a new business. If you have already entered data for the business, you can click on the View Analysis button to go straight to the output screen, otherwise press the Next or Edit input data button to progress to the Profile screens to enter your data.

At the top of this section you define the currency and scale to use when entering financial data. The rest of the screen is split into 2 sections:
The first section defines key structural factors for your business:

• The currency used entering financial data
• Business Type: an overall business classification into 1 of 6 categories.
• The % of products not manufactured: What percentage of your sales involve no manufacturing process at all (e.g. services or bought in goods).
• The number of employees in the business unit.

The second section details resources such as plant, marketing and customers which are shared with other businesses in the company. Like many fields in the softwarethese comprise drop down menus with a range of choices rather than asking for precise numbers.

The Competitive position page is divided into 4 sections:

asks for the following fields:

• Your market share in value terms.
• The combined share of the 3 largest competitors in the market excluding your business.
• The relative perceived quality of your business.
• The % of your sales that come from new products.

It is important to correctly define your market, making it too broad means you are not necessarily competing with the largest competitors and understates your share (i.e. if you are competing in a specific region but are considering the worldwide market), or you define it too closely and ignore competing technologies.

Relative quality is a measure of your business’ performance on non-price attributes relative to your competitors from your customers perspective. A value of less than zero indicates that your customers think you have a worse than average quality relative to competitors, greater than zero that they think you have a better than average quality product compared to your competitors. The range goes from -50 to +50 with the extremes representing very large differences in quality.

The definition of new products does not include things like changes in pack sizes or slight modifications to existing products but step changes, offering a new function to an existing market or an existing product to a new market.

Press Next to go to the next page, Back to go back to the business profile page.

Press Next to move to the next section.

Next: The PAR ROS Model