Purpose – This paper was written to help the lay reader understand how learning to look at art can be helpful in learning to evaluate business decisions. The lessons of sorting out the best from the very good in art are directly applicable to decisions in everything from product design to...

Forecasting inflation is a major concern for economists and businessmen. Most researchers have relied upon statistical techniques with their stringent data assumptions and low accuracy rates to predict changes in inflation, but only a few have investigated how neural networks can improve...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to establish correlations among the input variables of production within themselves and input variables of consumption within themselves and to forecast the production and consumption of the rice. Design/methodology/approach – The production and...

Examines the trade‐off between system redundancy and acceptance sampling as alternative means to improve system reliability. We assume that components of the system follow an exponential failure law and investigate expected times to failure of systems of various levels of component redundancy...

Goal programming is an extension of linear programming. Suggests that, although linear programming is used widely in decision‐making processes, it has a major limitation which restricts the users of the technique to narrowing their problems to a single objective function. Goal programming was...

This research examines the perceived problems with numerical skills applied to subject areas such as operations management and finance. Research has previously shown that a fear of the use of numbers can emanate from the under‐graduates’ secondary schooling and so hamper their further...

Rapid changes in today’s global markets are forcing businesses to re‐examine and improve the ways they compete. Integration of facility location decisions in global marketing and manufacturing strategies provides an important means for firms to compete in global markets. This paper proposes...

Presents a microcomputer‐based interactive decision support system (DSS) to assist managers to improve decision making for machine scheduling in a job shop environment. The system downloads data from a factory information system, and schedules work into the appropriate work centres. The system...

Considers the potential use of spreadsheets as decision‐support systems (DSS). Commences by considering the nature of DSS and the advantages and disadvantages of spreadsheets as DSS, and then proceeds to consider and illustrate some of the models that can be easily built with modern...