Sound streategic advice is often based on mathematical facts - especially probability and statistics. Hard numbers are difficult to argue against and often form the backbone of recommendations.For instance, when asked 'should we enter this market?' type questions, the strat analyst should perform ( perhaps with the team) rigorous stats to find things such as market size, customer volumes, liklihoods of purchase of certain products, variances, risks, how sensative are your projections, what is the numerical impact if assumptions are false, etc...Without stats backing up recommendations, the recommendations are prone to inaccuracy and risks entering the business. There are many tools out there that do calculations for you- but you need to know a few things:1. Why do you want this info- for what purpose, what does it tell you and how is it relevant to the problem etc.2. What do you need to do with the tools to get the answer- what info do you need to feed into the tools to crunch the numbers to get the outcome etc...most tolls thesedays ( exel, BI type tools etc) will integrate with databases and will have the data feed automatically, but its no substitute for knowing why you want that analysis done.
