Top-Modeler : Supporting Complex Strategic and Operational Decisionmaking

Senior managers frequently make difficult strategic decisions that affect their entire organization. To do this, they often must rely on management experience and intuition. A growing arsenal of tools can be used to ensure that experience and intuition are appropriately applied and even enhanced by industry-wide best-practice knowledge, a comprehensive understanding of the firm s strengths and weaknesses, and an analytic assessment of how to prioritize implementation activities. This paper describes the use, development and evaluation of a tool called TOP-MODELER. We discuss the foundations of TOP-MODELER and the process of developing and validating its comprehensive knowledgebase. We also illustrate how TOP-MODELER has been applied to help streamline and clarify strategic and operations decisions for a wide array of strategists, designers, and managers in manufacturing (and other) organizations