HEART TRANSPLANT DECISION
In a large city a heart has become available for transplant and three people have the necessary blood and tissue match. All are urgent cases with a prognosis of having only a few days or weeks to live without receiving a transplant. One is a fifteen year old girl from a wealthy family, easily capable of affording the entire expense. The second is a poor 30 year old mother of three young children, with no insurance. The third is a married 35 year old scientist with no children, doing research on AIDS with a possible breakthrough, whose insurance covers 50% of the cost. Who should get the heart, remembering that a heart transplant may or may not succeed, and even if it does, the patient may nor may not survive for very long?

Clearly this is an immensely difficult decision. Over the years the method has been used to help resolve dilemmas in a wide variety of areas including:

- Evaluation of Energy Sources
- Fishery Harvesting
- Geo-political issues
- Strategic Planning
- Economic Stabilisation
- Medical Diagnosis

CONSULTING AND FACILITATION
Our faciliation includes our consutants leading the decision sessions, establishing the appropriate decision criteria and extracting information from the participants. We then symthesise this data, identify the most attractive decision alternative and produce a detailed and clear report which provides justification and explanation of the approach used. Our consulting services can include the establishment of a decision-office, the setting up of documentation, systems and processes to ensure that your organisation routinely makes decisions in a consistent and effective manner.

These represent very different decisions in very different industries. Yet they both were resolved by means of a process of weighting up value, gained through the inputs of many different individuals and then sysmthesising the result in a very transparent manner, emanating in a defensible position. It turns out that different looking decisions have the very same underlying structure and as a result are amenable to the same type of technique. The technique is called the Analytic Hierarchy Process or AHP. It is designed to to do the following:

- Reflect a team's thinking in a natural manner.
- Provide focus for discussion, judgements and disagreements.
- Reveal inconsistencies and allow for create resoultion of these.
- Aggregate weighted opinions and reveal a priority list.
- Provide explanaton and transparency in arriving at a decision.

OUR EXPERIENCE
We at Numerix have been working with AHP for many years. We have conducted training courses, faciliated important decision-making sessions and provided consulting services to large organisations across many industries. Our consultants are expert both at implmenting the method and at helping senior mangement teams to use it to their advantage. They have contributed research papers to International Symposisa. Sample decisions that we have worked with include:

Tender Evaluations
- Investment Selection
- Building site selection
- Relocation Preferences
- Project Selection
- Recruitment Decisions
- Investment Decisions

among many more.

For more information please contact us.

The links below will also provide more detail.