Getting Started

Expert Choice Comparion® is a collaborative decision-making solution that focuses on the achievement of objectives (gains) from a decision to choose one or a combination of alternatives.  Comparion is typically used by professionals responsible for strategic or tactical decision-making activities involving the choice of one or a combination of alternatives. 

Why use Comparion for important decisions? 

According to Herbert Simon,¹ decision-making is at the core of all managerial functions.  Decision-making is undoubtedly the most difficult and most essential task a manager performs.  Executives rate decision-making ability as the most important business skill, but few people have the training they need to make good decisions consistently.  Planning, for example, involves deciding what should be done as well as when, how, where, and by whom.  Other managerial functions, such as organizing, implementing, and controlling rely heavily on decision-making.  Decision-making is part of almost all human endeavors.  While most decisions are connected with problem solving, many are not.  Managers may decide to take actions that will set entirely new standards of performance or decide to attain some new goal or establish a new direction for their companies.  Most managerial activities such as problem solving, strategic planning, and resource allocation, involve one or more components of what we now define as the decision-making process.

Process Overview

• structure the decision model by identifying the objectives and alternatives, contributions, and other model definition and evaluation settings
• accurately measure the importance of competing objectives and alternatives with respect to the objectives
• synthesize information, expertise, and judgments, and conduct what-if and sensitivity analyses
• allocate resources to a combination (portfolio) of alternatives if desired
• generate and download reports of the judgment data, model definition, etc.

After logging in to Comparion, you will be redirected to the Models list tab as shown below.  If you have existing Comparion models, you will see the active models on this page. 

You can open an existing model by clicking on the model name.  You can see several commands by clicking the arrow icon to the right of the model name, or by simply right-clicking a model row.

You can create a new model in various ways:

• New Model-- creates a new model using the default options set. 
• New from Template -- creates a model from one of the stored Comparion templates. 
• New From File -- creates a project from a file previously downloaded from a Comparion model and stored on your computer. 

When a Comparion model is open, the top-level menus (see Process Overview) described above are displayed:

Clicking on a top-level menu will open its overview page which displays the sub-pages you can go to.  From above, the Define Model overview page is displayed.  Clicking a sub-page will redirect you to that page.  You can go back to the overview page by clicking again the top-level menu as shown below:

Alternatively, you can use the left menu which displays the same sub-pages on the overview page, but this is only available when the Auto-Advanced option is enabled. 

You can view a more detailed help specific to each Comparion screen by clicking the "?" icon at the top right of each screen, or you can navigate our Full Help Center.