Applications of Fuzzy Technology in Business Intelligence

Fuzzy Set Theory has been developed during the last decades to a demanding mathematical theory. There exist more than 50,000 publications in this area by now. Unluckily the number of reports on applications of fuzzy technology has become very scarce. The reasons for that are manifold: Real applications are normally not single-method-applications but rather complex combinations of different techniques, which are not suited for a publication in a journal. Sometimes considerations of competition my play a role, and sometimes the theoretical core of an application is not suited for publication. In this paper we shall focus on applications of fuzzy technology on real problems in business management. Two versions of fuzzy technology will be used: Fuzzy Knowledge based systems and fuzzy clustering. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with basic fuzzy set theory and the goal of the paper is, to show that the potential of applying fuzzy technology in management is still very large and hardly exploited so far.