"A very rich book sprinkled with real-life examples as well as battle-tested advice.” —Pierre Haren, VP ILOG, IBM "James does a thorough job of explaining Decision Management Systems as enablers of a formidable business transformation.” —Deepak Advani, Vice President, Business Analytics Products and SPSS, IBM Build Systems That Work Actively to Help You Maximize Growth and Profits Most companies rely on operational systems that are largely passive. But what if you could make your systems active participants in optimizing your business? What if your systems could act intelligently on their own? Learn, not just report? Empower users to take action instead of simply escalating their problems? Evolve without massive IT investments? Decision Management Systems can do all that and more. In this book, the field’s leading expert demonstrates how to use them to drive unprecedented levels of business value. James Taylor shows how to integrate operational and analytic technologies to create systems that are more agile, more analytic, and more adaptive. Through actual case studies, you’ll learn how to combine technologies such as predictive analytics, optimization, and business rules—improving customer service, reducing fraud, managing risk, increasing agility, and driving growth. Both a practical how-to guide and a framework for planning, Decision Management Systems focuses on mainstream business challenges. Coverage includes Understanding how Decision Management Systems can transform your business Planning your systems “with the decision in mind” Identifying, modeling, and prioritizing the decisions you need to optimize Designing and implementing robust decision services Monitoring your ongoing decision-making and learning how to improve it Proven enablers of effective Decision Management Systems: people, process, and technology Identifying and overcoming obstacles that can derail your Decision Management Systems initiative

Decision Making in Systems Engineering and Management is a comprehensive textbook that provides a logical process and analytical techniques for fact-based decision making for the most challenging systems problems. Grounded in systems thinking and based on sound systems engineering principles, the systems decisions process (SDP) leverages multiple objective decision analysis, multiple attribute value theory, and value-focused thinking to define the problem, measure stakeholder value, design creative solutions, explore the decision trade off space in the presence of uncertainty, and structure successful solution implementation. In addition to classical systems engineering problems, this approach has been successfully applied to a wide range of challenges including personnel recruiting, retention, and management; strategic policy analysis; facilities design and management; resource allocation; information assurance; security systems design; and other settings whose structure can be conceptualized as a system.

For MIS specialists and non-specialists alike, this text is a comprehensive, readable, understandable guide to the concepts and applications of decision support systems.

Systems and Decision Making A Management Science Approach Hans G Daellenbach University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand Traditional methods of problem solving, based on the cause-and-effect model, can no longer cope with the complex situations in which decisions have to be made today. These problem situations occur within a systems context. Most of these systems are created and controlled by humans and it is, therefore, important that decision making is guided by a systematic and comprehensive methodology that helps the decision maker to make effective use of his/her extensive but limited powers of reasoning. Systems and Decision Making combines contemporary systems work with Operations Research (OR). Daellenbach places an emphasis on developing a methodology for decision situations that lend themselves to quantitative approaches rather than give an elementary survey of many OR/MS techniques. It incorporates some of the learnings of soft systems methodology for more practical problem solving, particularly at the problem identification and formulation stages. The text also shows that the scientific component of modelling can be considerably enhanced by the use of various diagrammatic devices. The second part of the book studies a number of topics important for the analyst, such as how to deal with the time element, with constraints, with uncertainty, and with multiple goals. These are demonstrated by various OR/MS techniques. Systems and Decision Making is an excellent core text for undergraduate and graduate students of systems, management science and MBA courses.

In recent years, there has been a growing debate, particularly in the UK and Europe, over the merits of using discrete-event simulation (DES) and system dynamics (SD); there are now instances where both methodologies were employed on the same problem. This book details each method, comparing each in terms of both theory and their application to various problem situations. It also provides a seamless treatment of various topics--theory, philosophy, detailed mechanics, practical implementation--providing a systematic treatment of the methodologies of DES and SD, which previously have been treated separately.

Presenting an in-depth discussion of the major inventory and production decisions faced by both private and public organizations, this book also covers the latest decision-making systems, such as Just-in-Time Manufacturing, KANBAN, Distribution