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

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 work, or make a small donation to support my effort to maintain this website.

About the author

Welcome to BPMSG – February 2015

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

time for a short update on bpmsg.com. Firstly, I wish you a healthy and successful New Year 2015, and for all of you with Chinese background: Gong Xi Fa cai – 恭喜发财, the year of the sheep is coming.

As I had a lot of other activities over the last few months, I was not very active here on my blog here, but the daily number of visitors is still increasing, and I receive feedback and questions regularly, most often about AHP. Thanks for all your comments, and please continue to give me your suggestions and ideas. My AHP online software has now more than 300 registered and active users. Please take note that users, not active for more than three month, will receive an email notification to re-activate their account within two days, otherwise their account incl. all project data will be deleted.

The latest publications, using my AHP Excel template or online software, cover areas like productivity improvement, smart TV human computer interaction, building sustainability and others. I try to keep the list of references up-to-date. Please cite my paper here, if you use my tools and plan to publish your work, and let me know about it.

Surprisingly my post about the Synology DS1513+ network attached storage (NAS) got a lot of readers. Online security seems to be an issue, and making remote online access more secure is indeed an important topic. So I opend the comment field on this post for feedback and questions.

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

Klaus D. Goepel,

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

About the author

Welcome to BPMSG – Feb 2014

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

the development of my AHP online software is still continuing. Most of the recent changes were structural, and not so obvious to users, as I use the software on two different platforms and in two different designs. On the entry page you will now find a short introduction to the analytic hierarchy process, and links to further examples and documentation. From there you can go to the online priority calculator, or the AHP online solution to handle complete projects.

Overall the functionality is complete and the program is stable. Except for group inputs, the priority calculator includes all functions of my AHP excel template. With the AHP online system you can even define complete AHP hierarchies and evaluate alternatives. For both programs the results can now be exported as csv files for further processing in spreadsheet programs in two versions: using either dot or comma as decimal separator.

The next big step would be the implementation of group decision making. My idea is to implement web sessions for different users  on different computers, and an online consolidation of all judgments, to get the consolidated group result. This could be very useful when you are in a meeting and have group discussions, then all participant could do their judgment online, seeing the consolidated group result in real time.

It will still take some more time, so bookmark the page and revisit  from time to time to get the latest updates.

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

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, Feb 2014

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

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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

Welcome to BPMSG – Dec 2012

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

yesterday I realized 10000 visits on my website since April 2012, when I implemented the Piwik web statistics. Over the last couple of months the daily visitor frequency was actually increasing, doubling within the last 3 months. On my youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/bpmsg I am now slowly reaching 100,000 video views.

So first to all of you a big thank you, showing interest in the topics of bpmsg.com, and especially to those of you,  giving me feedback, as I can learn and progress from there. For me it also means to stay committed and keep the content interesting and updated.

The topic with the highest interest is AHP – the analytic hierarchy process, and many of you downloaded my AHP excel template. Actually, here I would really like even more feedback about your applications, just to get an idea, in what other areas my template is used. Some of them, as I received, are:

  • Asset management prioritisation
  • BPMSG AHP template as a teaching tool
  • Weights of textual elements that affect difficulty of a given text
  • Environmental quality
  • Threads to biodiversity
  • Green supply chain

In my last update of the template  I improved the accuracy of calculation  significantly, so please always use the latest version, and revisit the site from time to time, to get the latest update. Alternatively you might subscribe to the bpmsg newsfeed; the link is given in the footer of the page.

My latest topic “Diversity index as business KPI – the concept of diversity” seems also to gain some interest. My video on youtube  got in a short time more viewers than the previous video about operational and strategic business performance. For me it was intersting to apply the diversity concept in business performance, as I haven’t seen this before, and the mathematical concept, to measure diversity of species in a habitat (biodiversity), is quite well established . I am thinking to publish a second video, showing more practical applications of the diversity concept in a business context.

After starting my youtube channel in 2009, I gained more and more experience in making videos. You can  clearly see the difference, comparing one of my older videos with the latest ones. Now my camcorder – a Canon XA10 – is with me most of the time on my business trips or vacations. Therefore you also find some video travel impressions on this web site under the topic “others”. My last trip was to the Philippines showing the nice island of Bohol, as well as one of the world’s largest crater lakes on a lake on an island – Lake Taal.

Klaus Goepel,
Singapore, Dec 2012

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

News from BPMSG

I’m really getting lazy …
No update of my web site since May 2012; page rank down from 3 to 2. What is going on?

It seems less questions coming up regarding my AHP excel template, though the number of downloads is quite stable. I am still curious to know about your applications; so please kindly feedback, if you are using the template for your study or work.

In between I upgraded my video equipment, using a Canon XA10 video camera and Adobe Premier Elements for editing. I produced a couple of videos for work and on holidays. Very satisfied with the results, brilliant quality in HD. Hopefully I will find some time to share my experience here or on  my Youtube channel,  so just stay connected.

Thanks so far!

Klaus

September 2012

P.S. Update Nov 8th, 2012 – Now having  problems with my XA-10 Camcorder

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Strategic and Operational Business Performance

dashboardDecisions can have a short- or long-term impact; they can be strategic or operational. Measuring strategic or operational performance might require a different set of key performance indicators (KPIs). You need both: Operational KPIs help to measure the short term performance of an organization, strategic KPIs help to measure the implementation of a long term strategy.

This new podcast episode #13 explains the differences, using the picture of driving a car.

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