A new decision-making tool designed by researchers at the University of Portsmouth has been praised as outstanding for its potential contribution to business.
Dr Alessio Ishizaka, Dr Philippe Nemery and colleagues won the Outstanding Paper Award for the Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2013.
Their research on sorting methods, used by decision makers in all sectors including finance, the environment, marketing and medical diagnosis, has the potential to help improve the results of complex decisions.
Their research is published in the latest edition of the Journal of Modelling Management.
Dr Ishizaka is an expert in decision analysis and Dr Nemery is a mathematician.
In their study, they examined 20 small and medium sized businesses in France to assess the quality of their decisions and the success of each business.
They found existing decision-making tools, widely used by businesses, give results which are too broad to be meaningful and, as a result, are unable to help a decision maker make radical improvements.
Instead, the researchers developed and tested a finer detailed and visually graphic model, which they say will make it much easier for businesses learn and grow.
Dr Ishizaka said: “Companies prosper or fail as a direct result of decisions taken by managers or stakeholders, so it’s vital the way they make decisions is examined.
“Several decision-making tools exist but they provide raw, quantitative data rather than richer qualitative results which give decision makers true insight into multi-criteria problems.”
The new model allows decision makers to compare different actions and outcomes on a visual scale.
When the model was tested it gave a huge degree of detail about each companies’ strengths and weaknesses, which no previous models had been able to do.
Dr Ishizaka said: “This new model allows us to understand each company compared to its competitors. We could see, for example, that a company was good at project management but weak at human resource management, while a second was good at knowledge management but poor at product development, giving a much fuller measure of each companies’ capabilities.
“Existing models give flatter results, for example, ranking companies from best to worst, even if all the companies are performing poorly, and with no detail on which aspects were needing attention and which were being managed well.
“In our case study we could see immediately, once analysis was done, that even the best-ranked company still had room for improvement. That sort of detailed information is of significant help to anyone whose job is to make the best decisions, whether they are in finance, medicine or any other sector.”
The French co-authors of the research have since been awarded a grant of nearly 500,000 Euros from the French trade union, Union des Industries et Métiers de la Métallurgie, to develop the tool online to allow all businesses to use the tool to evaluate themselves. Dr Ishizaka will be supervising the development of the website and analysing the collected data.
