The process by which decisions are made on investment in advanced manufacturing systems is critical to ensuring a company's survival in today's rapidly changing operating environment. Investment in new hardware and software is made for a variety of reasons, but each investment brings with it an expectation of improved performance. This may relate to increased capacity, specific cost reductions, or to improving company performance in areas difficult to quantify but considered of strategic importance to the company's survival, time to market, quicker product development, improved quality, flexible response, better integration between functions, etc. Given limits to the capital available and the rate at which change can be tolerated, companies have to decide on their priorities. Such decisions cannot be taken on economic grounds alone when many of the costs and benefits are difficult to predict. Many functions throughout the company may be affected and inputs to the decision process are required from increasing numbers of experts. This paper discusses how such a decision process might be designed and managed and gives examples from research within the electronics industries of the development of decision support tools using analytical hierarchical programming (AHP).
