DAME Tool - Group Decision Making and Evaluation Made Simple

Group evaluation techniques are many and group decision-making is always challanging. There are whole software packages today specializing only in just that like Expert Choice, for example. But what if you don't want to shell out thousands of dollars and achieve a comparable result? Believe it or not, there is a way and it is rather simple and virtually free. DAME stands for Decision Analysis Module for Excel and it is quite a useful solution.

Group evaluation techniques are many and group decision-making is always challanging. There are whole software packages today specializing only in just that like Expert Choice, for example. But what if you don't want to shell out thousands of dollars and achieve a comparable result? Believe it or not, there is a way and it is rather simple and virtually free. DAME stands for Decision Analysis Module for Excel and it is quite cool.

Take an example of Expert Choice. Within a space of two decades it grew from a niche decision making software application to a big group decision making tool. It is based on AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) originally developed in Pittsburgh by Prof. Thomas Saaty. It is good and you can certainly try it for free. However for "production" purposes it will cost you (or your company) thousands of dollars a year.

Of course, the calculations can all be done "by hand" but, truly, who would have time for that? You're looking for a tool after all to save time.

This small university developed a simple but very useful Excel add-in that can do just that. Courtesy of Prof. Jaroslav Ramik who was behind the project it can be downloaded here. The Tool is called DAME (Decision Analysis Module for Excel) and this article is aiming at showing some of its very useful features. In other words by using it, you save not only time but money too.
So how does it work? The best start would be to consider a simple comparison of 4 products that was part of one of my previous articles. The products have the following prices:

A = $190
B = $230
C = $320
D = $290

It is the simplest evaluation task possibe but even in this case hand calculations would still be quite time-consuming. You're going to get exactly the same results (a final rank of evaluated alternatives) with DAME without using any calculations whatsoever in a matter of minutes.
All in all, DAME is an extremely neat solution.

It can be used for much more advanced tasks like requirements prioritization.

Download Instruction Manual.