Vincent Clivillé, Lamia Berrah and Gilles Mauris
Industrial companies are continuously looking to improve their business turn-over and choose improvement actions to achieve this objective. Legitimating this choice by only a…
Abstract
Purpose
Industrial companies are continuously looking to improve their business turn-over and choose improvement actions to achieve this objective. Legitimating this choice by only a strategic financial point of view currently has some limits, because additional ones such as quality, delay, resources needs have also to be taken into account. The multicriteria decision aid (MCDA) approaches have been developed to deal with problems such as ranking, sorting or quantification. The purpose of this paper is to describe the operational aspects in MCDA deployment through a case study submitted by the SME Fournier Company.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper concerns analytical overall performance models to allow the decision-makers (DMs) to select potential actions to launch regarding given decision criteria. The principles of the main MCDA approaches, outranking and aggregation, are presented. Then representative MCDA methods, ELECTREIII and MACBETH, are successively deployed to a tactical decision problem of business turn-over increase. From the building of their respective preference modelling, decision aid is provided in the form of preference relation or performance function.
Findings
A formal framework supplying information to the industrial DMs in order to legitimate the action selection is described. In addition, the DMs feedback highlights the required expertise for the preference modelling.
Practical implications
The article gives a guideline for industrial practitioners to carry out ELECTREIII and MACBETH for their improvement action selection.
Originality/value
SMEs can find an adapted framework for their improvement actions choice dealing with financial and non-financial criteria. It is also enriched by practical considerations concerning the methods deployment for tactical decision problems.
Details
Keywords
Joe S.C. Au, Gail Taylor and Edward W. Newton
This is the first of two papers in which the design theories underlining the work of contemporary European and Japanese fashion designers are explored. In this paper, four…
Abstract
This is the first of two papers in which the design theories underlining the work of contemporary European and Japanese fashion designers are explored. In this paper, four general, major influential factors are discussed; specifically, the historical factor, the aesthetic factor, the cultural factor and the marketing factor. In order to investigate the underlying design theories of European fashion designers, two European fashion designers with international reputations are discussed, namely, Christian Lacroix and Karl Lagerfeld. These design theories are contrasted with those of two Japanese designers, Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo. The images of their customers, sources of inspiration, and possible underlying design theories are analysed with reference to their contemporary work.