سرمایه گذاری در آنالیز کارایی تولیدات صنعتی: فرایندی تحلیلی و برون ریز در یک شرکت شیمی Investment performance analysis of industrial products: Case of an effluent processing facility at a chemical company

1. Introduction Making investment decisions for industrial products costing large sums of money can be quite complicated. Customers must analyze the performance of potential alternatives, and then determine the architecture and specifications of the product, all while being mindful of rapid changes taking place in the technological environment. The difficulties arise primarily from intangible factors, such as customer judgment on criteria that enters into the evaluation and the need to select an appropriate alternative. Confounding the decision-making process is that preferences for products are often subjective. As such, the performance analysis relies heavily on experience, generalities, and intuition, all of which lack transparency and traceability (Tan et al., 2006). One industry that would benefit from a more objective decisionmaking process is that dealing with effluent process systems (EPS). Stehna and Bergstromb (2002) € proposed a customer-oriented approach to the design of industrial products that could be applied to the performance analysis of an EPS. Their approach, however, did not explicitly incorporate customers’ subjective preferences into the design. Because customers were unaware of the factors that were taken into account or how trade-offs were resolved, they were wary of accepting the solution. As a customer of an EPS, a manufacturer faces tremendous challenges in designing the processing system and selecting the appropriate technologies. While many decision-support frameworks have been proposed in the literature (e.g., Tan et al., 2006; De Felice and Petrillo, 2014; Bouzarour-Amokrane et al., 2015), only a few studies have provided systematic models that consider intangible factors such as the customer’s judgment of decision criteria. What is available, though, is objective data, which can provide a quantitative analysis of the specifications of potential alternatives underlying the process in the performance analysis. For example, traditional methodologies for quantitative analysis, such as cost-benefit analysis, are often used to evaluate alternatives. To date, a number of approaches to the performance analysis of industrial products have been proposed. A workable approach to the design of an EPS has been limited, however, as each manufacturer demands its “haute-couture” design of the system, whose details range from the ease of risk management to the green image of the company. Consequently, if we are to include other factors (e.g., opportunities and risks) in the analysis, then performanceanalysis approaches that take into consideration only benefits and costs of alternatives do not fulfill the requirements.