A novel operational decision making method for SMES.

Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) performance is a function of the composite of the decision-making processes within the enterprise. Owner managers are conscious of the gap in their decision-making efficacy and acknowledge that the process is often unstructured and over reliant on ‘gut feel’. While there is a drive to introduce better decision aids, such as ERP implementations, their propensity to provide data rather than information does not speak coherently to the decision context within the SME. Owner managers typically resort to ex-post accounting measures (often on spreadsheets) as the basis for enterprise decision-making. This would suggest that the understanding of the SME operational decision needs has not been well articulated either in the literature or in current practice. A better understanding of the decision needs structure would facilitate the selection and deployment of more effective decision aids within SMEs. The purpose of this thesis is to provide such a structure via a Method for Structured Operational Decision Making (MSODM), which allows the user to ascertain relative decision difficulty and prioritise the operational decisions requiring management intervention. Relative decision difficulty is determined using the Decision Difficulty Taxonomic Technique (DDTT), which consists of a detailed analysis of the three main elements of a decision, namely the decision itself, the decision maker and the decision environment. Decision prioritisation is based on the assessment of the impact of decision scenarios (clusters of related operational decisions) on enterprise performance measures. The method also incorporates a decision improvement cycle which identifies, develops and deploys decision specific support solutions and then measures the ‘before and after’ impact on the decision difficulty. The resulting MSODM not only ensures resources are focussed on the areas of most concern to the SME owner manager providing coherent guidance as to the most opportune areas to apply decision aids, but also provides a measure of the relative impact of any solutions deployed.