A Manager's Guide for Better Decision-Making

An important activity for an organization’s leaders and managers is making decisions associated with problem-solving. Making decisions is a complex endeavor where choices are made from courses of action where resources are limited and in the presence of constraints. Written as a guide, this book offers a quantitative approach to decision-making.

The process of decision-making is presented from a holistic point of view. This book offers a basic understanding of the issues and processes involved in decision-making by presenting the tools associated with problem analysis, tools that enable developing choices, as well as tools used to normalize judgment criteria achievement so that they are comparable across measures using different scales. Several solution methods for decision problems that have one evaluation criterion are explained first. Methods for problems with multiple criteria for evaluating alternate solutions are discussed as well. The multiple criteria methods include those that do not require any explicit preference or trade-off information from the decision-maker and those that do require the decision-maker’s preference or trade-off information.

The intended audience of the book includes technical and nontechnical professionals, managers, and supervisors at all levels, and engineering and business educators. The book would also be useful to undergraduate students, beginning graduate students, and recent graduates of professional programs, or in mathematics, computer science, natural sciences, and humanities.

Abu S. M. Masud has received a BSc (Mechanical Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering Technology), Diploma in Business Administration (Institute of Business Administration, Bangladesh), and MS and Ph.D. (Industrial Engineering, Kansas State University, USA). He is a licensed Professional Engineer (Kansas, USA). He is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers as well as of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Management Society International. He is currently an Emeritus Professor of Industrial, Systems, and Manufacturing Engineering at Wichita State University, USA. He has 37 years of teaching and academic administration experience (as Dean of the Graduate School, Associate Dean of Engineering, and Department Chair) at Wichita State University. He was also the Boeing Professor of Global Engineering, a chaired position, at the same university. From 1978 to 1980, he was an Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering and a researcher at the New Mexico Solar Energy Institute of New Mexico State University, USA. For two summers he was ASEE-NASA Summer Faculty Fellow at NASA Langley Research Center. From 1987 to 1988, he was a Researcher at Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research. He has about four years of industrial experience in power generation and gas distribution organizations in Bangladesh. He has consulted extensively for aircraft manufacturers (Boeing, Cessna, Learjet), electric utility company (KG&E), many medium and small-sized manufacturing companies in the USA as well as at academic institutions in the USA and the Middle East. He has given seminars and workshops in the US and internationally on topics ranging from decision making, student learning assessment, academic program development, and institutional and program accreditation. Since the mid-1990s he has been a program evaluator for the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET, the engineering program accreditor in the US. For over 20 years he was a peer evaluator for the Higher Learning Commission, a regional accreditor of higher learning institutions in the US. He is the author/co-author of a book, six book chapters, and over 45 journal articles and conference proceedings papers. He currently consults in the areas of engineering education (accreditation, program development, and student learning assessment) and the application of engineering principles in private and public-sector organizations (decision making and analysis, forecasting and data analytics, and system improvement). He also offers short courses and seminars in decision analysis, forecasting, data analytics, and multiple-criteria decision-making.

Abu Masud’s ORCID link is https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6844-0307.