Alternative Types (BA, SBB, SA)
Everything you build in Capex Strategy is an alternative of one of three types: a Base Alternative, a Strategic Building Block or a Strategic Alternative. They form a chain. The Base Alternative describes your business as it is today, Strategic Building Blocks describe individual changes to it, and Strategic Alternatives combine those changes into whole scenarios you can compare against the baseline.
The three types at a glance
Type | What it represents | Scope | Built from |
|---|---|---|---|
Base Alternative (BA) | Your business system as it stands today, and where it is heading if nothing changes. | The whole business system. | The financial model. One per project. |
Strategic Building Block (SBB) | One set of changes at one site. | A single site. | The Base Alternative, or a copy of another SBB. |
Strategic Alternative (SA) | A complete scenario for the business, made up of the changes you have chosen to combine. | The whole business system. | A selection of Strategic Building Blocks. |
Base Alternative
The Base Alternative is a digital reproduction of your business system as it stands currently: its sites, assets, investments, costs and revenues. It also carries that system forward in time, showing the trajectory you are on if things are kept as they are. This is often described as the as is going concern case.
The Base Alternative is the reference point for everything else. When a chart or report shows the difference an alternative makes, it is the difference against the Base Alternative that is being measured.
📌 Note: There is one Base Alternative per project, and it is not something you create from the Alternative List. It comes from the underlying financial model.
Strategic Building Block
A Strategic Building Block holds one set of changes at one site, with the Base Alternative as its starting point. Closing a production line, investing in new equipment, changing a cost structure: each of these is the kind of change an SBB captures.
An SBB is a working piece, not a finished scenario. On its own it tells you what happens at one site. It becomes part of a business-wide answer only once it is included in a Strategic Alternative.
You can build an SBB from scratch against a site in the Base Alternative, or duplicate an existing SBB and adjust the copy. 👉 Creating and editing Strategic Alternatives and Strategic Building Blocks
Why one Strategic Building Block covers one site
Each SBB should contain changes for a single site. The site is chosen when the SBB is created and cannot be changed afterwards.
This matters when the blocks are combined. Strategic Alternatives are assembled by picking a set of SBBs, and if one block spans several sites, the same site can end up covered by more than one block in the same alternative. That produces mismatches at group level and results you cannot rely on. Keeping each block to one site keeps the combinations clean.
💡 Tip: If a change affects three sites, build three Strategic Building Blocks. You can then combine them in a Strategic Alternative, and you keep the freedom to test each site's change separately as well.
Strategic Alternative
A Strategic Alternative is a combination of Strategic Building Blocks, and it describes a different trajectory for the whole business system. It answers the question you actually care about: if we make this set of changes across our sites, where does the business end up compared with doing nothing?
Because alternatives are assembled rather than modelled from scratch, testing a variation is cheap. Once you have a library of building blocks, you can combine them in any way you like and compare the outcomes side by side.
📌 Note: Only active Strategic Building Blocks can be selected when you create a Strategic Alternative. If a block is deactivated later, it stays in the alternative but is shown with a strikethrough.
How the types fit together
A worked example. Your Base Alternative shows three sites carrying on as they are. You want to test a plan that upgrades one site and consolidates another.
Build an SBB for the equipment upgrade at Site A.
Build a second SBB for the consolidation at Site B.
Create an SA that includes both blocks. This is your plan, modelled across the whole business.
Compare that SA against the Base Alternative in reports and charts to see what the plan is worth.
From there, variations cost very little. Create a second SA with only the Site A block to see whether the upgrade carries its own weight, or add a third block and compare all three alternatives at once.
Choosing what to create
You want to model a specific change at one site: create a Strategic Building Block.
You want to see what a set of changes does to the business as a whole: create a Strategic Alternative from the relevant blocks.
You want to test a variation of a plan you already have: duplicate the Strategic Alternative and change which blocks are included.
You want to take an alternative out of reports without losing the work: change its status rather than deleting it.