Use of function of desirability of Harrington's for quality estimation of business reputation (goodwill) of enterprise (on example of Russian metallurgical plants)

Harrington's desirability function is discussed in the present article as a method of qualitative evaluation of the enterprise's reputation. The validity of using this method is confirmed by the practical examples of their utilization for the evaluation of the reputation of the steel mills in Russia. It was also demonstrated that the suggested method may be effectively used as an additional tool when the enterprise's reputation (goodwill) is analyzed by the means of the quantitative methods. It was shown that Harrington's desirability function may also be applied to evaluate the reputation (goodwill) of the company and has an advantage in the fact that it removes the human factor (expert opinion) from the evaluation procedure and thus improves the results. This method also allows to monitor the change in goodwill value over times and the impact of the realized investment projects on the value of goodwill.