A decision support system for economic justification of material handling investments

This paper presents a decision support system for the economic justification of material handling investments. In particular it provides users with a formal mechanism to consider intangible or “soft” benefits associated with the investment in advanced material handling systems. The approach presented here is an extension to the work of Liggett and Sullivan [Engng. Economist, 37 (1992) 91] and Sullivan and Liggett [Manuf. Rev., 1 (1988) 151]. In addition to the development of the approach, we present a complete VisualBASIC program called JustMAT that serves as the implementation of the decision support system. The entire approach is illustrated with a numerical example.