Basic assumptions

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The FACTORFINDER-Procedure is based on assumptions on the interaction of promoting and inhibiting effects of input factors and their effect on the success of the alternatives.
One basic assumption is the existence of ideal values which can be assigned to each factor. Factors may show values that inhibit the success of a variant. Tolerance of success-inhibiting values increases as importance of factors decreases. Consequently, we can observe the more variants, the more values of each factor exist and the less important the factors are. In extreme, if all factors are critically important and only one value of each factor can be considered as being ideal, only one variant can be observed as being of acceptable success. All other variants must fail.
The less relevant the factors are, the more variants can be observed as being successful. The same holds true the more ideal values exist for each factor.
Robust alternatives show ideal values in important and in unimportant factors. They tolerate deteriorations most and by that it is advantageous to prefer them.

The model consists of 4 key elements:

·

It starts from the assumption that there must be ideal variants that can be described by certain values of each factor.

·

It a factor does not show those ideal values variants can turn inacceptable. This failure is not inevitable.

·

Adverse values lead to failure - the more important the factor is the more likely failure is.

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If several factors show goal-adverse values, the importance of these goal-adverse factors adds up to one value that represents the tendency to fail.