Kepa Software is pleased to introduce APO, a new, fully flexible and configurable decision- science framework that implements a capital governance standard and will transform how organizations prioritize capital expenditure requests and business investments. APO represents the first comprehensive approach to enable defensible capital allocation decisions across diverse investment portfolios, a tool that can rigorously apply the business’ selected capital governance standard.
Capital expenditure today is still managed in silos. In most organizations, value is still revenue and numbers-based with only verbal reference to anything intangible, which leads to a breakdown the moment executives attempt to compare value measures without a clear numerical value. This fragmented approach creates competing and often contradictory views of what matters, resulting in sub-optimal capital allocation, delays, cost over-runs, and eventual failure to meet portfolio outcomes. It also forces stakeholders to choose between financial outcomes and broader non-financial outcomes. APO was created to eliminate that false tradeoff.
Developed by Ken Garrard, a seasoned leader in portfolio optimization and capital investment prioritization, APO’s capital governance standard introduces a new way to prioritize both comparable and incomparable portfolios across the entire organization. By combining proven methods with intuitive decision software, APO helps leaders make defensible, transparent, and bias-free decisions on their most critical investments. The decision-science platform presents leaders with a prioritization tool that goes beyond financial logic to also weigh non-financial outcomes such as environmental impact, social outcomes, strategic alignment, regulatory compliance, and risk mitigation.
At its core, APO uses a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) engine tightly integrated to cost-benefit analysis to create a prioritization framework that ranks all capital expenditure requests and business investments in true business value order. This allows organizations to weigh every capital decision on the same scale, no matter how different those expenditures and investments might be. It also results in capital decisions that are statistically defensible and transparent.
“We are proud to introduce a capital governance standard that gives leaders a structured yet dynamic way to weigh financial and non-financial outcomes side by side, a way to prioritize different investments in a single framework and to make every decision defensible,” said Garrard.
He continued to say that since most decision frameworks have either been too simplistic or too complex, most organizations have been cornered into false choices. “For too long, organizations have had to choose between financial logic and non-financial outcomes. But now, decision science has matured to the point where businesses can now compare the incomparable. Our MCDA engine is like an automated Goldilocks system that brings this capability into everyday governance.”
APO’s capital governance standard allows each organization to define value in its own terms and build unlimited value models based on evidential requirements and its priorities. The portfolio optimization platform produces a list of all potential investments ranked by business value, shows where spending is unbalanced, and presents value for money through the lens of any value measure or group of value measures. This gives organizations a real-time view of the impact of their portfolio optimization decisions.
“APO can show organizations what to stop and what to accelerate,” added Garrard. “We built APO to help businesses identify which activities are, and which are not aligned with their goal, because we believe that every capital decision should be maximally valuable while also being completely defensible.”
Since its launch, APO has helped clients across various industries, including energy, transport, government, and asset managers reduce operational costs, strategically align their investments, optimize asset maintenance budgets, and minimize project portfolio costs. “In one client we demonstrated how they could save 54% of their budget,” said Garrard, who, went on to say that as organizations shift how they think about value, APO’s multi-dimensional approach to prioritizing business investments and capital expenditures introduces the future of capital governance.
“While financial returns remain important, the broader value equation has changed. It now includes ESG goals, strategic priorities, risk, safety, and compliance. With APO, we are helping organizations and governments to maximize the outcomes of their investment decisions by minimizing evaluation time, uncovering hidden value, reducing costs, and aligning investments with strategy,” concluded Garrard.
APO is available for organizations and government agencies of all sizes and structures. For more information or to book a demo call, visit https://kepasoftware.com/.
About Kepa Software:
Kepa Software was founded in 2020 by Ken Garrard and his late wife, Patricia, to develop APO, a world-leading decision-science platform. APO brings clarity to capital expenditure prioritization and portfolio optimization, transforming complex investment decisions into transparent, defensible processes. Kepa Software is based in Australia, has a secure data center in Sydney, and a core technology built on advanced MCDA integrated with CBA.