Investors must adopt profitable investment opportunities to maximize their wealth. Almost all investment, finance, engineering economics textbooks explain that net present value (NPV) measures the profitability (or value) of investment opportunities in absolute size, and internal rate of return (IRR) measures the profitability of investment opportunities in relative proportions. However, NPV is a measure of the relative size of the return on investment opportunity to do-nothing alternative. Moreover, IRR can occur in multiple investment opportunities and may not exist. To make matters worse, IRR and NPV also have conflicting problems in accept-or-reject decisions. In this study, the reason why NPV and IRR cannot accurately measure the profitability of investment opportunities is identified, and fundamental characteristics that investment opportunity profitability measures should have are presented.

The net present value (NPV) is generally used in accept-or-reject decisions in engineering projects. Although the internal rate of return (IRR) is a highly complex and arbitrary process, it can reach the same conclusion as the NPV criterion. However, neither the NPV nor the IRR indicates how much money should be invested and how much profit can be made from an investment during a project. In this study, based on the reasons why the NPV and IRR cannot correctly measure the profitability of an investment, the must-have profitability measurement characteristics of an engineering project are presented.

The IRR (internal rate of return) is often used by investors for the evaluation of engineering projects. Unfortunately, it is widely known that it has serial flaws. Also, External rate of returns (ERRs) such as ARR (Average Rate of Return) or MIRR (MIRR, Modified Internal Rate of Return) do not differentiate between the real investment and the expenditure. The PRR (Productive rate of return) is faithful to the conception of the return on investment. The PRR uses the effective investment instead of the initial investment. In this paper, we examined two cases of the engineering project. the one is a traditional engineering project with financing activity, another is the project with R&D. Although the IRR has only one value, it overestimates or underestimate profitabilities of Engineering Projects. The ARR and the MARR assume that a returned cash reinvest other projects or assets instead of the project currently executing. Thus they are only one value of a project’s profitability, unlike the IRR. But the ARR does not classify into the effective investment and non-investment expenditure. It only accepts an initial expenditure as for an investment. The MIRR also fails to classify into the investment and the expenditure. It has an error of making a loss down as the investment. The IRR works as efficiently as a NPW (Net Present Worth). It clearly expresses a rate of return in respect of an investment in an engineering project with a loan. And it shows its ability in an engineering project with a R&D investment.

The IRR(internal rate of return) is often used by investors for the evaluation of engineering projects. Unfortunately, it has serial flaws: (1) multiple real-valued IRRs may arise; (2) complex-valued IRRs may arise; (3) the IRR is, in special cases, incompatible with the net present value (NPV) in accept/reject decisions. The efforts of management scientists and economists in providing a reliable project rate of return have generated over the decades an immense amount of contributions aiming to solve these shortcomings. Especially, multiple internal rate of returns (IRRs) have a fatal flaw when we decide to accep it or not. To solve it, some researchers came up with external rate of returns (ERRs) such as ARR (Average Rate of Return) or MIRR (MIRR, Modified Internal Rate of Return). ARR or MIRR. will also always yield the same decision for a engineering project consistent with the NPV criterion. The ERRs are to modify the procedure for computing the rate of return by making explicit and consistent assumptions about the interest rate at which intermediate receipts from projects may be invested. This reinvestment could be either in other projects or in the outside market. However, when we use traditional ERRs, a volume of capital investment is still unclear. Alternatively, the productive rate of return (PRR) can settle these problems. Generally, a rate of return is a profit on an investment over a period of time, expressed as a proportion of the original investment. The time period is typically the life of a project. The PRR is based on the full life of the engineering project. but has been annualised to project one year. And the PRR uses the effective investment instead of the original investment. This method requires that the cash flow of an engineering project must be separated into ‘investment’ and ‘loss’ to calculate the PRR value. In this paper, we proposed a tabulated form for easy calculation of the PRR by modifing the profit and loss statement, and the cash flow statement.