editorial – BPMSG

Welcome to BPMSG – September 2017

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

Over the last three months I did a lot of under-the-hood changes and clean-up on the website to improve safety and user experience. As you may have noticed, the protocol is now https: the web traffic is encrypted using an SSL client certificate. After some tweaking the page performance could be improved significantly, loading time is nearly reduced by half. All pages, including my AHP-OS online software and the diversity calculator, were made mobile friendly, though I don’t recommend to use AHP-OS on a small mobile phone screen.

In addition some new features were added to the AHP-OS online software:

I also wrote a paper about the AHP software implementation, where you can find a description of the structure and all mathematical formulas and references. Please make a reference to this paper, when you use the software in your work to be published.

Kindly support my effort, either with a donation, or at least give a 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent) rating to my web posts, which will help me to get some feedback on my work.

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

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, September 2017

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

Last update: Sep 14, 2017 Author: Klaus D. Goepel, BPMSG, Contact

Welcome to BPMSG – June 2017

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

over the last four months I put in a lot of effort to improve the AHP-OS online tool. With several releases a simplified menu structure and new features were introduced.

Delete individual participant’s inputs from an existing project.
Update a project hierarchy or project description, as long as there is no input.
Evaluate your AHP projects using different AHP judgment scales.
Analyse weight uncertainties based on small randomised variations of input judgments.

The last two features are based on my recent study about the comparisons of different AHP scales. Up to date there was no recommendation, what scales to use, and I found a new approach to analyse and compare the scales based on simple analytic functions. This study is submitted for publication, and I hope it will not take too long, until it is available. You can find some more information already in my posting here.

The feature of analysing weight uncertainties is an innovative way of doing sensitivity analysis: all judgments are randomly varied by ±0.5 on the judgment scale, and for each variation the maximum and minimum out coming priorities are captured. I use 1000 variations, enough to get a relatively stable margin of errors for each weight. It gives you information, how “precise” a weight or ranking is in your specific project.

Again, 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, June 2017

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

About the author

Welcome to BPMSG – September 2014

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

After more than three months it is time for a short update on bpmsg.com. Things getting more quiet: less questions, less feedback, though the number of visitors remains constant with approximately 2000 per month, and the number of downloads of my AHP excel template is slowly approaching 12 Thousand. My AHP online software seems to be quite stable now. The latest correction was a small bug, using criteria names with more than 35 characters. Kindly let me know in case you experience any other problems, and be sure that I appreciate all feedback.

The last couple of weeks I was quite busy, integrating a network attached storage (NAS), the DS1513+ from Synology, into my network. It is always a challenge to protect your devices against external web attacks, so I had to learn a few new things about Linux, openSSL and VPN. But now it seems to be working, and I am able to run ‘my own cloud’ services, and access the station remotely, even through restrictive firewalls. In one of my next posts I will share my modifications and measures.

There are also a few new AHP applications I am working on. In my latest project I use AHP to determine criteria weights of a product market matrix for a portfolio analysis. The two axes of the matrix are market attractiveness and competitive position. An attractive market has high market entry barriers, high profitability, a large volume, a significant growth rate and established competitors, not fighting price wars. Your competitive position is characterized by your market share versus the strongest competitor’s market share, your market presence, the price flexibility, program quality and potential for innovation. Once the weights of these criteria are defined, you can map your product portfolio in the matrix, and use it to develop strategies to strengthen your future position in the markets.

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

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, September 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

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

About the author

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

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

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:

Diversity as Business KPI – The Concept of Diversity, and
Diversity as Business KPI – Alpha and Beta Diversity.

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