Enhancement of a decision support system for economic justification of complex systems

Economic justification for complex systems, such as material handling equipment or computer network infrastructure is difficult to perform when many intangibles exist. Traditional methods of economic justification typically exclude intangibles. JustMAT is a decision support system that incorporates both the tangible and intangible in an analysis. JustMAT uses the Dunn-Rankin methodology to transform the Net Present Value and the intangible attributes into normalized indexes plotted on a two-axis graph. This allows the analyst to determine if the intangibles are significant or not to the analysis.; Presented in this thesis is the enhancement of a decision support system called JustMAT. The DSS software enhancement enables the net present worth analysis to be performed using either before or after tax cash flows. The original JustMAT used only before tax cash flows and therefore ignored the consequences of taxes in the analysis. The addition of the after tax cash flows enabled a more precise analysis of the investment decision, which is particularly advantageous for investments that produce only cost savings.