About ICON Associates

The Icon Associates is a group of independent consultants affiliated to provide a broad spectrum of services to our Aerospace, Defense, and Information Technology clients. Established in 1988, the group has focused on the conduct of Competitive Pricing Analysis and Strategy Development in the Tactical Systems, Mission Simulation and Training, and C4ISR programs markets. The development of a winning pricing strategy transcends the entire breadth and depth of any new business effort. Consequently, the skill sets offered by the Icon Associates include technical, operational, financial, information technology, industrial, strategic planning, pricing, and marketing disciplines. These skills are available to our clients, exclusive of the ICON Competitive Pricing Analyses capability, should they so choose.

The ICON model is a combination of a stochastic top down system, subsystem, and component estimates, based on the databases and pricing trends developed over the preceding five years. While only the previous two years specific data are used in the analysis, trends set over the five year period that reflect competing companies’ pricing and business strategies are used to establish parameters within which the accuracy of the top down stochastic approach can be assessed. The product of the analyses is always a bounded conclusion, never specific.

Parallel with the stochastic analysis, ICON builds a bottom up object oriented deterministic value to be compared parametrically to the top down approach. The process is shown in Figure 1 and its features described in Figure 2. Bottom line experience over more than ten years of application of the model is 88 % accuracy, 2 sigma. Divisions of large companies, small businesses, universities, and branches of the U.S. government have used the application of the ICON model successfully to analyze their issues of interest.

A significant byproduct of the ICON process is an in depth insight into the government planning and budgeting process. While Future Years Defense Planning budgets are important, what is even more important is the strategy and program plan statements made by the Department of Defense Agencies which give private industry insight into specific project plans, similarly to what the Congressional Committees review in the budgeting process.