Strategy is defined with the client and underpinned by custom techno-economic models built from real operational data: first-principles physics plus cost.
Immerse in the operation — data, duty cycles, constraints, stakeholders and objectives — and capture the agreed cause-and-effect picture in a Decision Map.
Build a custom Python / Excel techno-economic model from real operational data — first-principles physics plus cost.
Expose the value drivers: sensitivities, platform comparisons, infrastructure trade-offs and risks.
Define the lowest-cost, highest-performance pathway, and the staging, capital plan and trade-offs the decision turns on.
Support implementation: business cases, prototypes, OEM engagement and executive alignment.
A signature first-phase deliverable, the Decision Map. Many engagements begin with a solution already in mind that turns out to solve the wrong problem. The Decision Map is a simple causal diagram that gets your team's tacit knowledge onto one page, so everyone agrees what causes what before any modelling begins. Quick to build, unique to HIC, and it gives your internal champion something clear to rally the organisation around.
The result: decisions that survive scrutiny, because the economics, the engineering and the operations were modelled together, not assumed.
A rapid screening and evaluation layer shortlists the options worth the deep analysis. Value-Ease screening and technical-maturity / feasibility optioneering triage the field; the survivors are then deep-modelled: total cost of ownership across corridors for a decarbonisation decision, or recovery, net present value and ramp-up risk for a processing or investment decision.
Value-Ease screening and structured technical-maturity, feasibility and optioneering assessment, for example, what technology can realistically fit a platform, and how that changes as the technology matures.
Energy analysis, platform development, full total cost of ownership modelling and fleet-wide scenario analysis, the quantitative core that turns a shortlist into an investment-grade pathway.
At the core of every engagement is a custom techno-economic model — first-principles physics and engineering coupled to the full cost stack — that lets you compare every viable option on a like-for-like basis, across the operation and over time, and see which one wins, by how much, and when.
What it gives you: the value drivers laid bare: the assumptions that matter, the sensitivities that move the answer, and a clear, costed pathway you can defend to a board. The same approach evaluates a fleet's route to net zero or the economics of a processing technology or project; only the metrics change: total cost of ownership and carbon for decarbonisation, or recovery, throughput, net present value and ramp-up risk for minerals processing.
We model where the technology is heading, not just where it is today. With new technologies — batteries especially — performance and cost are changing significantly over time. We model that change from deep industry knowledge to understand when a technology will be good enough. You don't want to base a strategic decision on today's technology when a better solution will arrive in five or ten years, so planning for that becomes part of the strategy itself.
The model we build for your decision is yours to keep: auditable, transferable at the end of the engagement and maintainable as things progress.
We'll walk you through the approach and where it adds the most value.