Strategic evaluation of flexible assembly systems on the basis of hard and soft decision criteria

Justifying investments in Advanced Manufacturing Technology has proved to be a rather complex issue for production management. Although they are aware of the strategic character of this technology, practitioners often seem to neglect that aspect in their decision process because of inappropriate management support methods. On the one hand, conventional approaches to justification of investment focus exclusively on hard decision criteria such as costs or paybacks. On the other hand, qualitative methods, such as scoring models, emphasize soft investment variables while lacking precise quantification of hard investment factors. Some methodical progress has been made by merging these traditional approaches into multi-perspective or multi-layer frameworks in order to strengthen the strategic dimension of investment decision processes. Against this background an integrated, system dynamics approach to evaluating complex investments in Flexible Manufacturing Systems has been developed and is presented in this article. Finally, the findings are illustrated by an investment case study. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.