Tag: Business Performance Management Blog

Welcome to BPMSG – Dec 2013

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

Season Greetings from Singapore!

 Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Surprisingly the implementation of AHP as an online tool went smooth and faster than I expected. Now my AHP online calculator is live, and within a few weeks frequently used by many visitors. During its development I also found a way to show the “ideal” judgments in case of inconsistent inputs; so now it is easy to modify initial judgments in the right direction in order to improve consistency. A feature I also implemented in my last update of the AHP excel template.

In addition, I managed to come out with an AHP project tool, where you can define the hierarchy of your AHP projects, as well as do the calculation of global priorities and evaluation of alternatives. This was a bit tricky, as the hierarchy can vary widely from project to project, so I had to find a flexible way, how to input the hierarchy structure. It is done using plain text with a defined simple syntax for nodes and leafs of the hierarchy. Sounds more complicated as it is, so I published some examples, and I am sure you will find it easy to use.

I use the tool for my own projects, the latest one developing a decision tree for the evaluation of company internal IT projects. Using the hierarchy tool you can export your defined hierarchy structure as csv and use it in Excel for further calculations.

Now please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to give me feedback – it is always appreciated.

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, Dec 2013

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. Please give credit or a link to my site, if you use parts in your website or blog.

About the author

Welcome to BPMSG – Oct 2013

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

Nearly half a year has passed since my last update in May on this page, and the year 2013 is soon coming to an end. In June, I had the opportunity to present my practical experience with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) on the International Symposium ISAHP 2013 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. You can download my paper here. It was interesting to meet the experts from around the world, dealing with decision making methods, and listening to some of their presentations. A short video shows my impressions of the meeting and the nice touristic spots in K.L.

I was invited to the panel discussion, and could discuss my newly introduced AHP consensus indicator for group decisions. It is based on the concept of diversity. Like AHP, diversity is a very interesting topic, as it can be applied in so many different areas. Originating from information theory (Shannon 1948), it became a well-established concept in ecology and economy. I used the principles to develop a key performance indicator (KPI), describing the diversification of businesses and the quality of growth. Feel free to watch my videos or read my posts on this blog.

What is coming next?

There will be one more video on my YouTube channel, showing the application of Shannon diversity to measure the quality of growth. Looking at diversity and growth over time we can display a growth trajectory of a company, giving a clear picture about the direction, where the company is heading.

The larger project will be the implementation of my AHP template as an AHP online tool. The idea is that you can input your criteria and do the pair-wise comparison online, to get as a result the calculated priorities. So at the moment I am busy to practice some web scripting and become more familiar with php. A first small exercise was my online diversity calculator.

Now please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to give me feedback – it is always appreciated.

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, Oct 2013

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. Please give credit or a link to my site, if you use parts in your website or blog.

About the author

Welcome to BPMSG – May 2013

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

time for an update on my BPMSG welcome page! Being quite busy the last half year, I didn’t work so much on major articles or videos, but at least I tried to keep my site current with some regular updates.

Related to the analytical hierarchy process (AHP), you might find information about the consistency ratio (CR). CR is one of the most critical issue in the practical application of AHP, as it seems to be difficult for many decision makers to fulfill Saaty’s “ten-percent rule-of thumb”. The way out: either you accept higher ratios (up to 0.15 or even 0.2), modify the judgements in the pair-wise comparisons, or you use the balanced scale instead of the standard AHP 1 to 9 scale. All three can be done in my updated AHP template from Februar 2013.

As I received many requests to extend the number of participants to more than 10, here the detailed procedure, how you can do it by yourself. Extending the number of criteria beyond 10 is more complex and not recommended by me. If you actually have more than 10 criteria please try to group in sub-groups. At the moment I don’t have any planes to extend the number of criteria to more than ten.

I also started a new topic: Diversity. Triggered by some business related questions, I found out that the concept of diversity – as applied in ecology – is very universal, and can be applied in many business areas. You can watch my introduction as video:

I already applied the concept in several areas, and even developed a new consensus indicator for group decision making based on the partitioning of the Shannon entropy.  A paper is submitted for the ISAHP conference in June, and after the event I will place a copy of the paper on my site for download.

For those of you, interested in the topic of diversity and the partitioning in alpha (within group) and beta (in-between group) components my free BPMSG Diversity Calculator could be a useful tool.

Now please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to give me feedback –
it’s always appreciated.

Klaus D. Goepel,
Singapore, May 2013

BPMSG – One Year On-line

After being on-line with the website for 1 year, it’s time to change the entry page!

Here, on BPMSG.com you will find a couple of interesting articles related to business performance management, from a more practical than theoretical point of view.

Topics covered range from

A new topic was introduced just recently: “Value-driven leadership”. I started with a general article, and added a personality profiling tool (NEO-select). If interested, you might participate and send back the completed questionnaire to get a full report.

In the section other stuff  I post other interesting information, not fitting to the main topic of the site. For example a nice video of the olive-backed sunbird, a review of the Sennheiser Bluetooth Headset etc.

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.

Please also be so kind, if you use parts in your web-site or blog, to give credit and a link to my site. I hope you will find some useful information, let me know your feedback or contact me directly for any suggestions.

Klaus Goepel, Mar 2012

about the author

Welcome to BPMSG

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

  • You want to make profit with your company?
  • You want to find out where the company stands and actively manage and optimize its performance?
  • You want to set-up your own small business and need to find out whether it can be successful?
  • You need to write a business plan?
  • Or you just want to learn something about business performance, key ratios and indicators to get a better insight in business processes?

Whether you are a CEO of a company, a private person to setup a small individual business or a student, these pages will give you a better understanding of some basic facts and relationships in business. 

I have provided them based on my practical experience in working life. I am convinced that you will find some interesting parts, which you can adapt and apply to your business operation.

Maybe, the viewpoint is sometimes different from what you have learned before. As I am an engineer, I am approaching the topic with my engineering background. Don’t be worried, when I sometimes use mathematical expressions. I do it in order to have a more general coverage of the concept, and I am using just simple operations like addition, multiplication, and so on. In most cases you can make all necessary calculations with a simple calculator.

I hope you enjoy the web-site, if you want to comment, feedback or make suggestions, please feel free to do it here.

The site went on-line on May 1st, 2011

Combined Performance Index

BPM-combIn order to limit the number of Key performance Indicators (KPIs), and maintain clarity and conciseness of a dashboard, sometimes it might be useful, to combine a set of performance indicators into one single key performance indicator. This latest episode of my podcast will show, step-by-step, how you can build up a combined performance index. using

  • a target value,
  • a base value and
  • a weighting

for each individual indicator. It also gives an example how to implement this concept in an Excel spreadsheet.

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