Engineering Export Council of Egypt (EECE)
Menova delivered a two-day AI for Business Strategy workshop, eight hours a day, to executives of companies affiliated with the Engineering Export Council of Egypt. Built on the SOSTAC framework, day one moved from prompting mastery through a full situation analysis — PESTEL, Porter's Five Forces, a weighted competitor scorecard and customer 5W+H — to a written three-year Winning Aspiration; day two locked strategy, tactics with an export track including INCOTERMS, a 90-day roadmap with RACI, and a balanced scorecard, closing with an AI-assisted executive strategy deck.
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The challenge
EECE member companies compete in export markets against larger, better-resourced rivals, in a macro environment of currency volatility and shifting Gulf demand. Their executives did not need another AI tools demo — they needed a written strategy, built with AI doing the analytical heavy lifting and the executives making the choices.
The approach
- Two full days structured on SOSTAC — Situation and Objectives on day one; Strategy, Tactics, Action and Control on day two.
- Day one opened with prompting mastery — POCAB, chain-of-thought, few-shot and self-critique — plus the 4D fluency framework: Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence.
- Situation analysis completed live for each company: PESTEL, Porter's Five Forces, a weighted competitor scorecard, customer 5W+H, and the 3-Circle points-of-difference model.
- Day one closed with each company's three-year Winning Aspiration — one sentence, dated, financially anchored, challenged in the room.
- Day two locked the strategy — arenas, vehicles and differentiators, stress-tested for coherence — then built the tactical mix: the 7Ps with an FX-aware pricing cascade.
- A dedicated export track: INCOTERMS (EXW, FOB, CIF, DDP) and who carries which cost and risk, a 13-criteria agent evaluation matrix, and export KPIs — with a parallel domestic track for home-market players.
- Action and control: a 90-day roadmap with a RACI matrix, and a balanced scorecard with a review cadence.
- Capstone: each company assembled its executive strategy deck with AI assistance, and pitched it back to the room.
The result
- Each participating company left with a completed situation analysis, a written Winning Aspiration, a locked strategy, a 90-day execution plan with owners, and a balanced scorecard.
- Real prompts for every framework — PESTEL, Porter, competitor matrix, market entry — written for Egyptian exporters, not generic examples, and reusable after the workshop.
- The closing pitch-back turned private plans into public commitments in front of peer companies.
Strategy work, not a tools tour
This engagement was the AI for Business Strategy workshop in its full form: two eight-hour days that end with a written strategy, not a reading list. AI did the analytical heavy lifting — research, synthesis, scenario drafting — while the executives did the one thing AI cannot do: choose.
Day one: from prompting mastery to a North Star
The morning built the prompting muscle the rest of the workshop depends on — POCAB for structured briefs, then chain-of-thought, few-shot and self-critique for harder analytical work, framed by the 4D fluency model: what to delegate, how to describe it, how to discern good output from bad, and who owns the result.
The afternoon put it to work on each company’s real situation: PESTEL forces specific to Egypt and the Gulf in the planning window, Porter’s Five Forces on industry profit potential, a weighted competitor scorecard, the customer 5W+H, and the 3-Circle model separating genuine points of difference from points of parity. The day closed with each company drafting its three-year Winning Aspiration — one sentence, dated, financially anchored, in the register of “the default supplier for Gulf food and beverage plants by 2028, with 40% of revenue in USD” — and defending it.
Day two: choices, mix, and the export track
Strategy came first — arenas, vehicles and differentiators, stress-tested as a whole rather than admired one slide at a time. Then tactics: the 7Ps with a pricing cascade built to survive currency movement.
Because these are exporters, the workshop carried a dedicated export track: the four INCOTERMS every exporter must price around — EXW, FOB, CIF, DDP — and exactly which costs and risks each one shifts from buyer to seller; a 13-criteria matrix for evaluating export agents; and the export KPIs that prove the plan is working. Companies focused on the domestic market ran a parallel track: FX-aware 4Ps, anchor-client framework agreements, and their first AI use case to build.
The final hours converted choices into execution — a 90-day roadmap with a RACI matrix and one measurable result per month, a balanced scorecard with a review cadence — and the capstone: each company assembled its executive strategy deck with AI assistance and pitched it to the room.
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