Blog – BPMSG

Welcome to BPMSG – Jan 2021

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

Thank you for visiting BMPSG; another six months passed and – probably due to Covid 19 – the interest in my online tools for business performance management and the Analytic Hierarchy Process is not declining.

My free AHP online software AHP-OS gained popularity. I haven’t made major modifications, but I am pleased to announce the addition of the Spanish language version. Just click on “Español” on the entry page, and all text output will be in Spanish. I appreciate this contribution from Gregorio, who made the effort to translate the English text files! Any other language translation is welcome, if you want to contribute, please contact me.

When using the software, please make a reference to my paper published in IJAHP about AHP-OS from 2018.

In the last couple of months I shifted my focus from (AHP) software development using PHP to other software developments using Python, yet I will maintain AHP-OS in future. Please let me know if you discover any bugs.

Many thanks to all donors, supporting this website, please continue to support my effort with a small donation, especially when you use my free templates or online software. Over the last 3 years donations were barely sufficient to finance my running costs.

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to leave me a comment – it is always appreciated. And keep in mind: Better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

Klaus D. Goepel, Singapore, Jan 2021

BPMSG stands for Business Performance Management Singapore. As of now, it is a non-commercial website, and information is shared for educational purposes. Please see licensing conditions and terms of use.

About the author

Welcome to BPMSG – Oct 2016

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

The analytic hierarchy process AHP remains the main topic of this website and continues to have the most visitors. As I continously receive quite a number of questions related to AHP, my AHP excel template and my AHP online software, I have summarized frequently asked questions (FAQs) in one posting here.

In between my online software was used by more than 3000 users, and has currently 500 active users. Please be reminded that after a period of 3 months inactive users will receive an re-activation email and be deleted, if they don’t reactivate their account.

A couple of months ago I added a Donation button to the website – see below. A big Thank You to all donors! Please note that the website is a non-commercial website for educational purposes. Your donation is used to cover running costs like web hosting, antispam services etc. PLEASE, help to support this website with a small donation. I spend a lot of time, sharing my knowledge for free. Thank you in advance!

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to leave a comment – it is always appreciated.

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, October 2016

Please give credit or a link to my site, if you use parts in your work, or make a small donation to support my effort to maintain this website.

About the author

Welcome to BPMSG – Mar 2016

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

The analytic hierarchy process AHP remains the main topic of this website and continues to have the most visitors. From October 2015 to now I received quite a number of questions related to my AHP excel template and my AHP online software. Here some of the typical questions (FAQs):

Q: Can I extend the number of participants to more than 20?
A: Though it is possible in principle, the better way is to use my AHP online software with (practically) unlimited number of participants. I will not do a further extension of the template.

Q: Do you have a version of the Excel template w/o multiple inputs?
A: Yes, a simplified version is available on request from the author.

Q: How can I cite your work, can you give me a reference?
A: Please cite my paper: Implementing the analytic hierarchy process as a standard method for multi-criteria decision making in corporate enterprises–a new AHP excel template with multiple inputs

Q: Do you support Fuzzy AHP?
A: No, I have made no provisions to support Fuzzy AHP, neither in Excel, nor in my online software.

Q: Can I use the Likert scale instead of the AHP scale?
A: No, AHP is based on the rational scale 1/9 … 1 … 9. It cannot be replaced by the Likert scale.

Q: How is the computation done, where do I find the description and formulas?
A: Please download my paper.

Q: How can I do alternative evaluation using your Excel template.
A: It is not possible. The template can only handle one category of a hierarchy and calculate the priority of one set of criteria.

Q: If I have a group of decision makers, do they need to register for the online software?
A: No, they don’t need to register. As the owner of a project you get a link for group decision inputs. Simply send them the link, and they can start the pairwise comparisons.

A couple of months ago I added a Donation button to the website – see below. Unfortunately, only a very small number of users used it, a big Thank You to them! PLEASE, help to support this website with a small donation. I have no commercial interest, but spend a lot of time, sharing my knowledge for free, and I have running costs to keep the site alive. Thank you in advance!

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to leave a comment – it is always appreciated.

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, March 2016

About the author

Welcome to BPMSG – October 2015

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

it’s soon coming to five years that my webpage has been online, and things getting slowly a bit messy … There was a need to clean-up the pages, posts and directories, so that the necessary maintainance will take less time, and future updates are possible. As you should know, this project is done in my free time as a hobby, I still have a full-time job for another couple of years.

Unfortunatly, during the whole process, some links were broken and it will take time to repair. Sorry, when you experience missing images or a broken link. Just let me know using my contact page. I am still working on it and plan to simplify the navigation in order to make it easier for you to find relevant information.

AHP as one category, where you find information about the analytic hierarchy process, will stay in focus. From the start this was the nost frequently visited part of the site, and my AHP excel template slowly reaches 15 thousand (!) downloads. Under the category Articles you find posts about other topics, mainly the concept of diversity, as I was using it for different applications. All more personal related topics under the category Other will move to my new personal blog – Klaus & Lita – running on my own server with topics like multicopter, programming and – maybe – cooking in future.

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to leave a comment – it is always appreciated.

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, October 2015

Please give credit or a link to my site, if you use parts in your work, or make a small donation to support my effort to maintain this website.

About the author

Welcome to Business Performance Management – Aug 2015

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

time for another update of my welcome page! Since Chinese New Year in February there have been only two minor updates of my AHP Excel template. On request of many users, it can now handle two criteria. Though there are still a few requests to increase the number of criteria to more than ten, I am not planning to extend the template, as too many pairwise comparisons have to be done, which will be troublesome for the decision makers. It is much better to further breakdown the hierarchy into additional categories.

My AHP online software seems to be quite stable. Beside the regular user administration, I didn’t put in more effort, and the number of active users varies between three and four hundred.

I still get regular feedback via the contact page. It seems that many of my visitors are students, using my tools in their thesis. Sometimes I am asked, whether it is allowed to use them, and the answer is “yes”. As long as you use the software and templates for non-commercial purposes, e.g. education or research, you are allowed to do so. But please give credit to the author, and make a reference to the source.

Since end of last year I started a new hobby, flying remote controlled multi-copter. The header picture of my blog shows the skyline of Singapore, taken with this type of aerial platform. It is a fascinating technology and a lot of fun. I managed to finish my first own-build project, as small miniquad, and also started to develop some simple formulas to estimate flight speed and rate of climb. More to come here!

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to give me comment – it is always appreciated.

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, August 2015

BPMSG stands for Business Performance Management Singapore. As of now, it is a non-commercial website, and information is shared for educational purposes. Please see licensing conditions and terms of use.

About the author

Fighting Spam

Operating your own website or blog, you will soon realize lots of comments with nonsense content and embedded links to obscure websites. These are comment spammers making your life difficult. Everyday you have to clean up or moderate all comments. In the past I used a wordpress plugin “spam free wordpress” to protect my blog, and for long time it was working fine without any problems. Writing a comment to my postings, you were asked to copy and paste a password from one to another field in the comment form. Suddenly it was not working any longer, and I found out that the developer changed his policy: I have to pay a license fee. Maybe I also should change my policy, and ask for a license fee to download my AHP excel template? So I was searching for a new free plugin. I installed SI Captcha Anti-Spam from Mike Challis, but still spam comments were coming through. So I enabled the honeypot spambot trap and it seems to work.

What is a honey pot spambot trap?

I learned some new things about spam, and also found an interesting project “Project Honey Pot” on the web. There you can find out more about harvesters, spammers, dictionary attackers and honey pots. You can participate in the project, install a honey pot or implement a quick link to fight spam. A honey pot is a – for humans invisible – link to a dynamic website providing “fake” e-mail addresses and forms for spam programs. If the form is submitted or an e-mail sent to one of addresses provided there, then you can be sure it is a spammer and record/block his IP address. Here an example of a quick link (opens in a separate window, don’t submit.) Usually this link is hidden -only visible for bots, spider programs etc.

Project Honey Pot also provides a useful service HTTP Blacklist to check IPs against a list of known harvesters, comment spammers, and other suspicious visitors to websites.

Now I can monitor suspicious activities on my website: within only two days I could see more than 100 attacks!

Check your own IP address.

Making your wordpress blog more secure

You find the individual steps easily in a web search. Most critical is the change of SQL table prefixes. I did it manually using phpMyAdmin. When finished, no link was working any longer. Reason: permalinks were set to %postname%. After switching first to default and then back to %postname% everything was fine.

I also struggled with the password protection. Inportant: add the line ErrorDocument 401 default, otherwise you might always get the “page not found” message.

Steps to do:

Move config.php file one directory above wordpress installation directory
Remove admin user
(create new user with full rights and delete old user)
Protect wp-admin and wp-includes directories
(read for owner and group only = 751)
Hide wordpress version and login error messages
Add in functions.php (in your ChildTheme directory):
<?php remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’);
add_filter(‘login_errors’,create_function(‘$a’,”return null;”)); ?>
Delete readme.html file from web root directory
Password protect wp-admin directory (I used CPanel to create .htaccess).
Modify .htaccess file in wp-admin – add:
ErrorDocument 401 default
Modify .htaccess file in web root:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
SQL: change prefixes of database tables from
“wp_” to “new_prefix_”