| Enterprises expecting to be successful into the 21st century must carefully select their new products to develop. An intelligent decision support system (IDSS) was designed to enhance the process of choosing a new product from one or more alternatives. The critical factors to consider include financial, marketing, technology, organization and environmental criteria. These tangible and intangible factors are effectively combined to form a merit function composed of the value, investment, and success potential of the proposed new product. Uncertainty is accounted for within the IDSS by allowing the decision maker(s) to input a range of numbers and/or a most likely number. These inputs map into probability distributions that are used in a Monte Carlo type simulation to compute the probability distribution of the merit function and its associated elements. The rankings of the alternatives are determined along with a sensitivity analysis pointing to the factors that have the highest impact. Decision maker(s) can effectively determine if and what data inputs need to be refined during further iterations. The IDSS has been designed with three hierarchical levels of increasing detail using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). The first level provides a simple decision structure to more easily eliminate the weaker alternatives without exercising the full decision model. The second and third levels explore the higher ranking alternatives in more depth making the decision process more effective and efficient. The entire decision space of the decision maker(s) is captured within the input scaling. Since even the best of the alternatives being considered may not rate high on the merit scale, the decision maker(s) will have insight into the attractiveness of the alternatives as they fit within their decision space. An extensive literature search and background study, an expert survey, and field trials at three diverse corporations verified the unique contributions and confirmed the usefulness of the IDSS. The research developed a forward looking, widely applicable guide for enterprises to use in selecting and implementing their new product development efforts. |
