Zahn, Erich with Jurgen Greschner, "Strategic Evalution of Flexible Assembly Systems-Combining Hard and Soft Decision Criteria", 1995
ua435
The evaluation of investments in flexible assembly system lacks of an appropriate methodology. First a brief review of decision making process regarding complex investments is given. Such decisions have to be made in the tension of hard and soft decision criteria which often produce a dilemma for the decision maker: Considering only short-term effects in terms of hard criteria will usually kill investments proposals. In contrast managers feel the need for the investment but have difficulties to justify their intuitive insights. As a possible solution a System Dynamics based approach is proposed to bridge the gap between rational and intuitive judgment. The approach combines qualitative and quantitative criteria by using a computer-aided step-by-step modelling concept.