Int. J.

Production Economics 131 (2011) 1521

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Int. J. Production Economics

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijpe

A marginal analysis guided technology evaluation and selection

Kim Hua Tan a,n, James Noble b, Yuji Sato c, Ying Kei Tse a
a
b
c

Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham, Jubilee Campus, Nottingham NG8 1BB, England, UK
Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, University of MissouriColumbia, E3437 Engineering Building East, Columbia, MO 65211, USA
Graduate School of Policy Science, Mie Chukyo University, 1846 Kubo, Matsusaka, Mie, 515-8511 Japan

a r t i c l e in fo

abstract

Available online 29 September 2010

Making decisions on strategic investments, such as early stage manufacturing technology (MT), is a
complicated task. Early stage technologies are usually costly, and surrounded by uncertainty. The
potential benets are often hard to quantify prior to implementation. Thus, how could managers make
good decisions in a high-risk, technically complex business when the information they need to make
those decisions comes largely from the project champions who are competing against one another for
resources? Traditionally, in this problem domain, decisions are made based upon gut-feeling and past
experience, sometimes with the support of some multi-criteria decision-support tools. The criteria
evaluation process is very subjective and relies heavily on managers experience, knowledge, as well as
intuition. Thus, the evaluation approach is often not effectively carried out as there is lack of visibility
and traceability in the decision making process. The impact of this scenario is that managers are not
condent that resources are being optimised and applied to a mixed portfolio of projects to maximise
benets. This paper proposes a marginal analysis directed branch and bound approach for evaluating
and selecting early stage manufacturing technology (MT) projects. A case study is used to demonstrate
the application of the proposed approach. Implications of the proposed approach to practitioners and
academia are discussed and future research outlined.
Crown Copyright & 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Decision support systems
Early stage technologies
Marginal analysis
Visualisation

1. Introduction
Many early stage manufacturing technologies (MT) are of
strategic importance and may create future competitive opportunities. It is a challenge for manager to clarify the right
manufacturing technology alternatives as the number of technologies is increasing and the technology are becoming more and
more complex (Torkkeli and Tuominen, 2002; Shehabuddeen
et al., 2006). Therefore, managers need better methods that can
evaluate the strategic value of MT investment when the future is
uncertain (Auerswald et al., 2005). This paper denes early stage
as the early development of fundamental manufacturing processes or technologies.
Many researchers have developed approaches to support
technology evaluation and selection. The evaluation and selection
procedures have attracted the interest of a range of different tools
and techniques (Branke et al., 2007). Several common elements
were apparent, Henriksen and Traynor (1999) categorizes
these methods and techniques into the following categories:

Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: kim.tan@nottingham.ac.uk (K.H. Tan),
NobleJ@missouri.edu (J. Noble), ysatoh@mie-chukyo-u.ac.jp (Y. Sato),
lixykt@nottingham.ac.uk (Y.K. Tse).

(a) unstructured peer review, (b) mathematical programming

(LP, NLP, etc.), (c) economic models (IRR, NPV, etc.), (d) decision
analysis (MAUT, Decision Trees, etc.) interactive methods (Dephi,
Q-sort, etc.), (e) articial intelligence (Expert Systems, CBR, Fuzzy
logic, etc.), and (f) portfolio optimisation. However, some of these
methods are so mathematically elaborate that it is difcult for
managers to use them in practice. Loch and Kavadias (2002)
pointed out that existing selection models proposed in the
literature are highly complex, not transparent in application,
and as a result, have not been commonly used in management
practice.
Often, determining which technology to pursue combines both
quantitative and qualitative data that tend to stretch over an
extended time horizon before a nal decision is made. One
potential pitfall is that both during and after the decision process
the rationale for specic decisions can become unclear and
difcult to defend. A visual decision path that captures the logic
behind the variety of decisions made over the course of a
technology adoption process can provide both the decision
support and corporate memory necessary to ensure success in
the future.
There are numbers of literatures proposing decision support
models for solving technology investment problems (Khouja,
2005; Sriram and Stump, 2004; Debo, et al., 2005; Wallenius et al.,
2008), but only few models have been included for representing

0925-5273/$ - see front matter Crown Copyright & 2010 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ijpe.2010.09.027

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K.H. Tan et al. / Int. J. Production Economics 131 (2011) 1521

a transparent decision pathway of decision making process. The

importance of a visual representation to support decision making
has been emphasized by many researchers (Klein and Thomas,
2009; Caridi et al., 2009; Lohse et al., 1994; Tufte, 1990; Foil and
Huff, 1992; Eden and Ackerman, 1998; Tan and Platts, 2003). They
argue that visualisation transforms raw data into pictures that
people can understand quickly, and it is a form of knowledge
representation. Managers perform better when their problem
solving processes are adapted to a visual problem representation
(Vessey, 1991). Mckim (1972) sees visualisation as a visual
vehicle of thought to assist managers in making decision.
Foil and Huff (1992) point out that a visual representation such
as a mental map can provide new ways of examining and
improving managerial judgement. A mental map is in itself a
useful form for helping managers to make sense of complexity.
Visual representation can both simplify ideas and facilitate the
transmission of complex ideas from individual to individual and
unit to unit. Most importantly, visual representation helps to
divorce ideas from specic speakers, making them more accessible
to debate and modication. Moreover, they argue that visual
representations are of potential interest to managers because they
are a means of displaying graphically the rms current strategic
position, as various observers understand it, and because they hold
the promise of identifying alternative routes to improving that
position.
When setting out on the task of technology evaluation,
managers have available to them several existing visual techniques/models to aid structuring and analysing information, monitoring decision proceses, and communicating strategic direction. These
techniques are Inuence diagrams, DCF, Decision trees, Roadmapping, and Portfolio matrices. By and large, there are limitations
with these techniques when it comes to decision of visualisation
support:

 Overly simplisticDCF and Decision trees may not be suitable

for complex evaluation involving multiple criteria

 QualitativeRoadmapping and Inuence diagrams are helpful



to develop a structured network of thought that leads to better

insight but network relationships are difcult to quantify.
Lack of visibilityPortfolio matrices provide little traceability
on the decisions that lead to the matrix construction.

Clearly, the visual support for technology evaluation provided by

the above approaches is inadequate. And this is where managers
begin to feel uncomfortable. They ask: I have a range of alternative
technologies to invest in, but how could I visualise the decision
process to improve my condence in the decision made? Thus,
managers need a better way to make decisions, they need
traceability of the decisions made in the process to be presented
in a meaningful format. Lohse et al. (1994) pointed out that
appropriate visual representations can facilitate problem solving and
discovery by providing an efcient structure for expressing data. By
being able to visualise the path of decisions, managers are able to
consider and give a fair appraisal of their merits.
This paper reports on the on-going work in a project to apply
the marginal analysis-based branch and bound approach as the
basis of directing the selection of MT so that an integrated risk/
multi-criteria decision path can be developed. The proposed
marginal analysis approach is a sequence of transparent steps to
provide clarity of thought into the evaluation and selection
process that managers undertake. In the following sections, the
development of the proposed approach is explained. A case is
used to illustrate the application of the proposed approach. The
results are described and implications of this research for
industrialists and academics are discussed.

2. Marginal analysis directed branch and bound

An approach for determining the effect of taking a given
decision path (Noble and Tanchoco, 1993, 1995) is needed to
analyze the trade-off between different decision paths. When
considering the development of a decision path to support
selection of early stage technology it quickly becomes obvious
that most decisions are incremental in nature (Eilon, 1984; Tan
and Noble, 2007; Tse et al., 2009).
Marginal Analysis Directed Branch and Bound was rst
proposed by Noble and Tanchoco (1995) for directing the design
process of a complex material handling system, in which a
combined economic and performance justication path is developed to the engineers for nal judgment. Tse et al. (2009) has
adopted Marginal Analysis Directed Branch and Bound in
mitigating the product quality risk in global supply chain by
considering the incremental benet for conguring rms supply
network. Moreover, Tan and Noble (2007) proposed a Marginal
Analysis Directed throughput analysis approach, which employs
incremental calculus (Eilon, 1984) for evaluating the relationships
among various decision variables in a performance model
quantitatively.
For example, a XYZ technology-based system has capabilities
that tend to be a function of discrete decisions (whether they are
small parameter level changes or system level changes) and the
design process tends to reect this since decisions occur in a serial
manner. Therefore, it would be desirable for decision makers to be
guided down the most promising path if a method of projecting the
effect of each discrete decision were available. Fig. 1 illustrates the
concept of a decision path. In Fig. 1, all priority and risk criteria are
explored sequentially starting from the criteria that is weighted the
greatest. The approach proposed in this paper consists of determining an initial instance of the solution, then as the decision process
proceeds different solution changes are explored to determine
which provides the greatest marginal benet.
Overall, the goal of the marginal analysis guided approach is to
develop a decision path that can serve as the basis of a combined
multi-criteria (nancial, strategy, health/safety, supply security,
quality, importance, deployment, novelty, intellectual property,
customer service) and risk justication argument. The decision
path provides the reasoning from a marginal analysis perspective
as to why a specic aspect of the technology was selected. The
procedure requires that the decision maker determine the initial
selection criteria. The nature of the procedure enables the
decision maker to re-evaluate the selection criteria and to conduct
marginal analysis on the effect of changing selection criteria. This
is desirable since it is possible during the course of a selection
process that the decision maker might modify the selection
criteria due to insight gained. The result of evaluating not only the
technology alternatives, but also the decision criteria, is that the
nal decision will be fully justied. An additional benet of
justifying each decision (incrementally versus end-of-process) is
that the rationale behind each decision is captured (decision path)
and can then be used as the basis of an overall justication
argument.
Alternatives are evaluated using a branching and bounding
process with respect to each alternatives performance for the
selection criteria (see Fig. 2). In the process of evaluating an
alternative it is common for new alternatives to be generated
incrementally. This incremental alternative generation is analogous to the branching that occurs when exploring the solution
space of a combinatorial optimisation problem (Land and Doig,
1960). The decision maker then utilizes the results of the marginal
analysis to bound the solution back toward the required
performance. Hence, the marginal analysis serves as the basis
for exploring the solution space via a branch and bound approach.

K.H. Tan et al. / Int. J. Production Economics 131 (2011) 1521

17

Selection
Criteria
Risk
Financial
Strategy

Incremental Changes in Criteria

HSE

+0.1

Supply Security
Quality

+0.2
-0.2

Importance
Deployment
Novelty
IP Potential
Customer
Fig. 1. A technology selection decision path.

Branching

Bounding

Criteria 1
MT3
MT1
MT4
MT2

MT
Alternatives

MT4
MT2
MT1
MT3
MT

Ranked
Alternatives

Criteria 2

Performance
Analysis
Marginal
Analysis

Decision

Criteria n

Justification

Fig. 2. A branch and bound process.

3. A decision path example

The following presents an example to illustrate the application of
the marginal analysis approach. Company ABC must make a decision
concerning the adoption of a new product identication/tracking
technology. Initially, there are two different vendors and congurations associated with implementing this technology, both have
different performance levels compared with a set of evaluation
criteria (Table 1). The company has determined the overall priority
ranking between the four primary decision criteria (1st System
exibility, 2nd Compatibility with existing systems, 3rd Implementation cost, and 4th Vendor reputation).
The marginal analysis is initiated by establishing Alternative 1
as the baseline, then evaluating Alternative 2 relative to Alternative 1 (Table 2). As can be seen, Alt 2 performs slightly better
( +4.4%) with respect to System exibility (the highest ranked
decision criteria), but it is signicantly worse with respect to
Compatibility (  30.4%). Its performance on Compatibility alone is
sufcient to bound it from further consideration, so the fact that it
also performs poorly on Cost ( 10.4%) and somewhat better

Table 1
Primary decision criteria.
Criteria priority rank

Alt 1
Alt 2

1st

2nd

3rd

4th

Flexibility

Compatibility

Cost

Vendor

45
47

23
16

67
60

45
50

( +11.1%) with respect to Vendor does not inuence the decision

to remove Alternative 2 from further consideration.
At this point Company XYZ explores other potential providers
of the technology from which Alternatives 3, 4, and 5 are
generated (or branched) as shown in Table 3.
The marginal analysis proceeds by comparing Alterative
3Alternative 1 (Table 4). Alt 3 is slightly better with respect to
the top ranked criteria ( +11.1%) and the lowest ranked criteria
( +6.7%), Flexibility and Vendor, respectively. However, it is
signicantly better ( + 30.4%) with respect to Compatibility. The
only concern that is raised is that it is slightly less desirable

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K.H. Tan et al. / Int. J. Production Economics 131 (2011) 1521

Table 2
Marginal analysis on Alt 1 and 2.

Flexibility
Compatibility
Cost
Vendor

Table 5
Marginal analysis on Alt 4 and Alt 3.

Alt 1

Alt 2

Alt 2 vs Alt 1

45
23
67
45

47
16
60
50

4.4%
 30.4%
 10.4%
11.1%

Ok
Not acceptable
Not acceptable
Good
Reject Alt 2

Table 3
Other alternatives.
Criteria
priority rank

Alt 3
Alt 4
Alt 5

Alt 4 vs Alt 3

48
30
66
46

 4.0%
0.0%
1.5%
 4.2%

Concern
Ok
Concern
Reject Alt4

Table 6
Marginal Analysis on Alt 5 and Alt 3.
1st

2nd

3rd

4th

Flexibility

Compatibility

Cost

Vendor

50
48
55

30
30
30

65
66
66

48
46
55

Table 4
Marginal analysis on Alt 3 and Alt 1.

Flexibility
Compatibility
Cost
Vendor

Flexibility
Compatibility
Cost
Vendor

Alt 4

Alt 3

Alt 3 vs Alt 1

50
30
65
48

11.1%
30.4%
 3.0%
6.7%

Good
Good
Concern
Ok
Accept Alt 3

(  3.0%) with respect to Cost. However, the management team

deems this a valid trade-off and accepts Alternative 3 over
Alternative 1. This illustrates the role of the marginal analysis,
branch and bound, approach. It is not designed to prescribe
solutions, but rather to assist decision makers in supporting
decision making, capturing decision logic, and representing the
branching and bounding decision process.
Alterative 4 is compared with Alternative 3 (Table 5). The
result of the comparison reveals that across the board Alternative
4 has little additional to offer over Alternative 3. On three of the
four criteria is equal or worse and only on the third ranked
criteria, Cost, is it slightly better ( + 1.5%). Alternative 4 is bound
from further consideration and therefore rejected.
Finally, Alternative 5 is compared with Alternative 3 (Table 6).
The marginal analysis reveals that for all criteria Alternative 5 is
better or equal to Alternative 3. Therefore, Alternative 5 is
accepted and is considered to be the best overall alternative
currently available for implementing this new technology.
Fig. 3 illustrates the overall decision path as a result of the
marginal analysis of the different technology alternatives. Presenting the branch and bound decision logic in this manner
provides a visual of what decisions were made and the rationale
for making them.
The above example of a marginal analysis guided selection
process has illustrated the development of a decision path as a
means to support the evaluation and selection of a technology.
The approach provides a mechanism for analysing the impact of
each decision trade-off on overall technology performance so that
a quantitative analysis of the reasoning behind each decision
results. The resulting decision path provides a strong basis for
justifying the selection of a specic technology.
It is important to stress that the marginal analysis approach is
different from the widely known pairwise comparison approach
(Saaty, 1996). The proposed marginal analysis provides the basis

Flexibility
Compatibility
Cost
Vendor

Alt 5

Alt 5 vs Alt 3

55
30
66
55

14.6%
0.0%
1.5%
14.6%

Good
Good
Ok
Good
Accept Alt 5

for conducting pairwise comparisons and developing a sequential

decision path. A full pairwise comparison is not necessary
(and therefore, waste valuable decision maker time) if managers
can bound alternatives from further consideration, which is
possible when incrementally justifying each additional performance increment using marginal analysis.

4. Case study
A case study conducted by Tan et al. (2006) is used to further
illustrate the applicability of the proposed marginal analysis
approach. The case was conducted in Company Pharma, a worldleading manufacturer in the pharmaceutical industry. Traditionally, prioritisation and funding decisions for proof of concept
proposals on signicant, large MT projects in Company Pharma
were mainly made by a central committee. The approach,
however, could lead to gaps in the consistency of decision
making. Decisions were reached mainly through consensus and
the criteria used by the committee members to evaluate a
proposal were not explicitly known and documented. In the
previous work, a hybrid intelligent decision support system is
developed for supporting managers in making timely and optimal
MT investment decision. The intelligent system adopts Fuzzy
ARTMAP (FAM) neural network modelling techniques for retrieving the historical evaluation results. FAM is employed to guide the
retrieval process of the adapted case (i.e. the MT investment
project prioritisation and evaluation) in the repository. For a full
description of the hybrid intelligent system decision mechanism,
please refer to authors former work (Tan, et al., 2006). However,
the intelligent system approach has a major drawback in decision
visibility, i.e., the pattern learning mechanisms and the retrieval
process are blackbox mechanisms. The decision makers of
Pharma cannot know why this decision is made, what factors they
are considering, and what trade-offs has been taken.
As a result, the management team was not condent that the
resources had been optimised, as the decision process is lack of
transparency and traceability. Thus, the marginal analysis
approach is proposed to direct the justication of MT investment
decision making. The visibility of decision making is improved by
providing a clear justication pathway in which each criteria
trade-offs are clearly illustrated to the committee members.
The following example illustrates how the marginal analysis
approach can be applied at the MT Concept Phase for Company
Pharma. Table 7 represents 10 candidate MT projects with their

K.H. Tan et al. / Int. J. Production Economics 131 (2011) 1521

19

Alt 1

Alt 2

Alt 3

Alt 4

Flexibility

45

4%

11%

-4%

15%

Compatibility

23

-30%

30%

0%

0%

Cost

67

-10%

-3%

2%

2%

Vendor

45

11%

6%

-4%

15%

Reject

Accept

Reject

Accept

Alt 5

Fig. 3. Marginal analysis decision path.

with respect to the ratio of change between two pairs of

performance criteria.

Table 7
Set of candidate MT projects.
MT projects

Priority

Risk

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

63.4
64.3
72.9
54.9
69.4
40.4
55.2
40.1
31.7
40.6

44.8
52.8
59.2
34.4
44.8
44.8
30.4
12.0
22.4
67.2

respective Priority and Risk scores. The priority and risk scores are
determined in the evaluation module, which employs the FAM
techniques to access the criteria performance of each potential
MT project.
The marginal analysis approach involves a series of incremental priority and risk calculations, which are explained as
following:

 Incremental priority and incremental riskdetermining the

incremental priority and risk allows for a relative measure of

how each performance measure changes with respect to each
alternative. Given that the absolute measures of priority and
risk have no real meaning (unlike cost or prot that have a
monetary unit)an incremental approach provides a more
robust basis for conducting the analysis
Difference between incremental priority and incremental risk
calculating the difference between the incremental priority and
incremental risk provides an aggregate measure of how multiple measures of goodness combine (in our example we assume
that they are weighted equally, but if they were not then the
difference could be weighted accordingly). For example, a
positive incremental change in priority is desirable and a
negative incremental change in risk is desirable, hence when
both priority and risk have a relatively equivalent positive
incremental changethen the net effect is that there is not an
overall incremental benet for the challenger alternative.
Incremental priority/Incremental riskthis ratio provides additional insight into the magnitude of the overall incremental
changes, as such it is an auxiliary measure and not crucial to a
marginal analysis. It is also only effective when considering
pairs of performance criteria. Its role is to provide a relative
measure of the marginal differences between two alternatives

Table 7 presents marginal analysis results based on justifying

additional priority with respect to a changing risk prole and the
resulting selection decision. In this case Project 9 has the lowest
Priority score 31.7 and on this basis alone it is rejected. The
marginal analysis then proceeds by comparing the next highest
Priority score ( 40.1 for Project 8, with an associated Risk score
12.0). The marginal change in Priority score is 26.5% (40.131.7)/
31.7, with a corresponding marginal change in Risk score
 46.4%. This results in a marginal difference of 73%26.5
(  46.4) and a ratio of Incremental Priority to Incremental Risk of
 57% 26.5/ 46.4. Both a positive marginal difference and a
negative Inc Priority/Incr Risk ratio reveals an improvement
compared with Project 9. However, based on Project 8 having a
low overall Priority score it is classied as a maybe project.
Fig. 4 illustrates the resulting decision path with the Incremental
Priority, Incremental Risk, and Differences between Incremental
Priority and Incremental Risk given. Table 8 provides the
sequential marginal analysis calculations and resulting actions
for Company Pharma.
As the MT analysis continues into another MA evaluation, a
more detailed marginal analysis is conducted and a corresponding
decision path is generated (Fig. 5). In this case the projects ranked
as Maybe and Yes are further analyzed sequentially starting
from the lowest overall Priority score and considering the highest
individual Priority criteria rst. As the more detailed analysis
proceeds projects will drop out of contention based on their
marginal contributions.
As shown in Table 9, the Pharma managers identied the
sequence of conducting marginal analysis. The sequence is based
on the importance of the criterion for selecting the MT investment. In each marginal analysis, (i) the incremental criterion
performance (obtained from the intelligent system in previous
work), (ii) the difference between incremental priority
and incremental criterion, and (iii) the ratio of incremental
priority and incremental criterion are calculated. In this case,
there are eleven marginal analysis planed to be conducted, but
not all the marginal analysis will be gone through since the nal
solution usually is obtained before all the marginal analysis are
processed.
The results indicate that the proposed marginal analysis
approach could create a powerful decision path that helps Pharma
managers to gain insight into MT evaluation and selection
process. It is easy to apply, and the transparency of the decision
process helps to address one of the major limitations of existing

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K.H. Tan et al. / Int. J. Production Economics 131 (2011) 1521

Differences between Incremental Priority and Incremental Risk

7

+12

-32

-27

8
+73

-16

+84

Accept

+23
3

Consider

-273

Reject
6
-49 10

Solid line = Inc Priority

Dashed line = Inc Risk

Fig. 4. Illustrative decision path for technology selectionrisk marginal analysis.

Table 8
Marginal analysis on priority and risk for 10 candidate MT projects.
MT projects

Priority

Risk

Incr.
priority (%)

Incr.
risk (%)

Difference between Incr.

priority Incr. risk (%)

Incr. priority/Incr.
risk (%)

9
8
6
10
4
7
1
2
5
3

31.7
40.1
40.4
40.6
54.9
55.2
63.4
64.3
69.4
72.9

22.4
12.0
44.8
67.2
34.4
30.4
44.8
52.8
44.8
59.2

0
26.5
0.7
0.6
35.1
0.5
15.0
1.4
7.9
5.1

0
 46.4
273.3
50.0
 48.8
 11.6
47.4
17.9
 15.2
32.1

73
 273
 49
84
12
 32
 16
23
 27

 57
0.3
1
 72
5
32
8
 52
16

Action

Reject
Maybe
Reject
Reject
Yes
Yes
Maybe
Maybe
Yes
Maybe

Selection
Criteria
Risk
Financial

Incremental Changes in Criteria

Strategy

Accepted Projects

HSE

P4
+0.1

P4

P7

P7

P1

P5

P1

P5

P5

P3

Supply
Quality

+0.0
-0.2

Importance

P8

Deployment

P2
Rejected Projects

Novelty
IP
Customer
Fig. 5. Illustrative decision path for technology selectionsecond phase.

selection model i.e. not transparent (Loch and Kavadias, 2002).

The visibility of the decision process allows Pharma managers to
trace back how various different decisions were explored to
determine which project provides the greatest marginal benet.

Nevertheless, the marginal analysis approach does require the

decision maker to provide for some quantication of the benets/
costs associated with an alternative, this does require more time
and effort. The marginal analysis approach does not prescribe

K.H. Tan et al. / Int. J. Production Economics 131 (2011) 1521

Table 9
Sequence of conducting marginal analysis in pharma case study.
Sequence of conducting
marginal analysis

Criterion

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11

Risk
Financial
Strategy
Health/Safety (HSE)
Supply
Quality
Importance
Deployment
Novelty
Intellectual property (IP)
Customer

a solution (which some might consider a limitation), but rather it

provides rationale for why a decision is made.

5. Discussions and summary

The above case study has demonstrated the possibility of using
a marginal analysis approach to support managers in the difcult
task of evaluating and selecting manufacturing technology. The
marginal analysis guided approach develops a decision path as a
means to support MT evaluation. A marginal analysis is used to
evaluate alternatives with respect to all decision criteria. Then a
decision path is developed that captures the logic behind the
variety of decisions made over the course of a technology
adoption process. The decision path provides the reasoning from
a marginal analysis perspective as to why a specic aspect of the
technology was selected, thereby, providing the corporate
memory necessary to ensure success in the future.
A marginal analysis approach is a systematic approach for
transforming opaque decision problems into transparent problems by a sequence of transparent paths. In other words, it offers
the possibility to managers of replacing confusion by clear insight
into justication. The decision path provides new clarity to the
analysis process, allowing visualisations that are both easily
understandable and traceable. The path helps in understanding
and permits managers to assure both effectiveness and efciency
in evaluation and justication.
The power of the marginal analysis transforms opaque
decision situation into transparent ones. Thus, it helps to increase
transparency in the early stage MT evaluation process and ensure
managers the quality of thinking behind the evaluation was
consistent. Although encouraging initial results have been
achieved, the proposed approach needs to be further validated.
It is planned that continued application of the approach in a

21

couple of case companies will reveal the value of the proposed

approach in a real environment.
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