A Manager's Guide for Better Decision-Making

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.

1. Introduction 2. Tools for Problem Analysis 3. Developing Alternatives and Criteria 4. Measurement, Normalization, and Weights 5. Single Criterion Decision Problems 6. Multiple Criteria Decision Problems