Capacity Rule Sensitivity report

The sensitivity value is the marginal benefit for adding a unit of resource. That is, the change in overall score you expect by increasing the constrained resource by one unit. The unit of resource is defined for each capacity rule you create and can be different for each. For example, you have the following Custom Capacity rule: "The Sum of the CostPerOffer should be <= the value $100,000 for transactions from the offer/offer list Any Offer from channel Any Channel." If the sensitivity is 67, increasing the budget value by one from $100,000 to $100,001 would increase the overall sum of optimized scores by 67. The meaning of the score is whatever you set it to represent, for example, dollars of profit, dollars of revenue, or response probability. Similarly, if you create a Min/Max # Offers Capacity rule, the sensitivity represents the additional score value that is obtained by increasing the maximum number of offers available by one.

If you create a Min/Max # Offers Capacity rule with a minimum, the sensitivity might be negative. The sensitivity is still determined by increasing the minimum by one, that is, from 100 to 101. Since increasing a minimum constrains the problem even more, increasing the minimum most likely changes the score in a negative way.

You can use this report to analyze the cost of implementing capacity constraints. In an ideal world, there would be no minimum or maximum capacity constraint and your business would use the optimization results. You could then adapt inventory and other resources to maximize the score. The sensitivity value tells you the cost (the amount of score that is lost) by maintaining the maximum capacity rule at its current threshold. Using the example of the budget rule, say that the sensitivity value was 1,000 where the score represents profitability in dollars. This sensitivity value means that spending one additional dollar might return an additional $1,000 of profit. A high sensitivity value suggests you consider removing or relaxing a maximum capacity constraint. Similarly, a low sensitivity value indicates that there is low opportunity loss. For example, if the sensitivity value is $0.25, spending an additional dollar to gain 25 cents of profit is likely tolerable.