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The purpose of this paper is to develop an analytic hierarchy planning-based framework to establish criteria weights and to develop a school performance system commonly called school inspections.

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model uses pairwise comparisons and a measurement scale to generate the weights for the criteria. The validity of the approach is confirmed by comparing the outputs of school inspection and the outputs of the model in a sample of schools.

The framework proposed enables school management to address several issues pertaining to its competitive advantage with other schools, the two most important being establishing its performance ranking in the marketplace and identifying the service elements that most require improvement. This study develops a cohesive approach to identify which quality attributes or dimensions require attention.

For school inspections, the data collection and computational problems would increase with the increase in the number of criteria and sub-criteria, as well as the number of schools considered in the selection. Although the range of reported AHP applications is extensive in many disciplines, examples in school quality and inspection remain still rare; as a result, this study could not compare its results with other AHP applications in school inspection or assessment.

The AHP method has the distinct advantage that it decomposes a decision problem into its constituent parts and builds hierarchies of criteria. AHP enables assessors to capture both subjective and objective evaluation measures of school quality. By providing a useful mechanism for assessing the consistency of the evaluation measures and alternatives, the AHP reduces bias in decision making.

The AHP model also provides a more systematic evaluation of a given school’s qualitative performance criteria. The proposed AHP model is attractive to assessors and decision makers because its pairwise comparison procedure enables them to offer a relative (rather than absolute) individual criterion assessment on those qualitative factors.

The AHP model could become a sustainable component of overall school system quality improvement by maturing over time. The AHP annual scores could be used as realistic and measureable gauges for measuring school improvement.

Effective management of projects is becoming increasingly important for any type of organization to remain competitive in today’s dynamic business environment due to pressure of globalization. The use of benchmarking is widening as a technique for supporting project management. Benchmarking can be described as the search for the best practices, leading to the superior performance of an organization. However, effectiveness of benchmarking depends on the use of tools for collecting and analyzing information and deriving subsequent improvement projects. This study demonstrates how analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a multiple attribute decision‐making technique, can be used for benchmarking project management practices. The entire methodology has been applied to benchmark project management practice of Caribbean public sector organizations with organizations in the Indian petroleum sector, organizations in the infrastructure sector of Thailand and the UK. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of a proposed benchmarking model using AHP, determines problems and issues of Caribbean project management in the public sector and suggests improvement measures for effective project management.

In this study, the deployment of an integrated Quality Function Deployment (QFD) decision framework is presented to help cities design targeted strategies to become “smart”. Arguably smart cities leverage advanced technologies to enhance their smartness to improve everyday urban life. To this end, a QFD – Analytic Hierarchy Process – Analytic Network Process (QFD-AHP-ANP) framework is proposed to deliver guidance for selecting the appropriate mix of smart technologies based on the specific smart needs of each city.

The AHP and ANP methods are incorporated into QFD to enhance its methodological robustness in formulating the decision problem. AHP accurately captures and translates the “Voice of the Experts” into prioritized “Smart City” dimensions, while establishing inter-relationships between these dimensions and “Smart City Technologies”. Meanwhile, ANP explores tradeoffs among the technologies, enabling well-informed decisions. The framework’s effectiveness is evaluated through an illustrative application in the city of Thessaloniki.

Applying the framework to this real-world context confirms its practicality and utility, demonstrating its ability to particularize local, social, political, environmental and economic trends through the resulting mix of technologies in smart urban development strategies.

The importance of this study lies in several aspects. Firstly, it introduces a novel QFD decision framework tailored for smart city strategic planning. Secondly, it contributes to the operationalization of the smart city concept by providing guidance for cities to effectively adopt smart technologies. Finally, this study represents a new field of application for QFD, expanding its scope beyond its traditional domains.

This paper aims to develop a crisis readiness framework for road traffic crisis response for law enforcement agencies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

A Delphi method was used that combined questionnaire-based survey and the analytical hierarchy process to collect quantitative and qualitative data from an expert panel of crisis readiness professionals on how they prioritise and weigh the different strategic criteria, sub-criteria and performance indicators in the context of law enforcement agencies’ traffic response.

The findings of this paper resulted in the identification, ranking and validation of ten key dimensions of crisis readiness clustered into three distinct sets of priority rankings: response planning, resources, training and coordination; information management and communication and risk and hazard assessment; and early warning, legal and institutional frameworks, recovery initiation and property protection. The results additionally established the relative priority of sub-criteria for each criterion and validated a broad set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for the top six ranked criteria.

The findings are based on a single case study focused on a specific area of operation within crisis response and one group of organisations of the UAE police sector. This potentially places a constraint on the wider generalisation of the findings to different operational areas and agencies, as they may have different priorities or organisational conditions that have implications for the framework application and the relative importance of certain criteria and sub-criteria.

This paper provides strategic guidance in the form of a prioritised list of criteria, sub-criteria and KPIs that can direct efforts to optimise different dimensions of crisis readiness at a strategic and operational level.

This paper makes an original contribution in identifying the key criteria and performance indicators of crisis readiness for road traffic situations. The findings contribute a comprehensive strategic readiness framework that supports planning and decision-making for the development of organisational capacities that can enhance response times of police to road traffic crises. This framework ranks dimensions of crisis readiness and key sub-criteria in order of priority and validates the key components of crisis readiness that can support practitioners to structure, standardise and benchmark key processes and elements of crisis response.

The purpose of the paper is to develop an integrated framework for performance management of healthcare services.

This study develops a performance management framework for healthcare services using a combined analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and logical framework (LOGFRAME). The framework is then applied to the intensive care units of three different hospitals in developing nations. Numerous focus group discussions were undertaken, involving experts from the specific area under investigation.

The study reveals that a combination of outcome, structure and process‐based critical success factors and a combined AHP and LOGFRAME‐based performance management framework helps manage performance of healthcare services.

The proposed framework could be practiced in hospital‐based healthcare services.

The conventional approaches to healthcare performance management are either outcome‐based or process‐based, which cannot reveal improvement measures appropriately in order to assure superior performance. Additionally, they lack planning, implementing and evaluating improvement projects that are identified from performance measurement. This study presents an integrated approach to performance measurement and implementing framework of improvement projects.

The main purpose of this study is to provide some empirical evidence to support the consistency measure as an essential component in the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), which is known to be a research method useful to both decision making and empirical research in construction information and management. The measure helps to affirm that individual decision makers capture logical and reasonable preferences when making decisions. It also supports empirical research conducted by either practitioners or academic researchers to ensure that the questionnaires are not poorly answered. Measure of the consistency level is expected to be able to detect inconsistent responses. In this study, strategies have been adopted to compare the AHP with the simple rating method to justify the criticality of consistency using data from a study of construction supply chain information. Three groups of responses (overall, consistent and inconsistent) based on the consistency measure were compared. Results indicate that responses to the AHP method having acceptable consistency (the consistent group) were shown to be consistent with the responses from the simple rating method. This supports that the consistent responses are reliable. Suggestions are given to improve the undertaking of AHP research.

Customization is a difficult task for many organizations implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new framework based on customers’ requirements to examine the ERP customization choices for the enterprise. The analytical hierarchy process (AHP) technique has been applied complementarily with this framework to prioritize ERP customization choices.

Based on empirical literature, the paper proposed an ERP customization framework anchored on the customer's requirements. A case study research method was used to evaluate the applicability of the framework in a real-life setting. In a case study with 15 practitioners working on the vendor's and the client's sides in an ERP implementation, the paper applied the framework jointly with the AHP technique to prioritize the feasible customization choices for ERP implementation.

The paper demonstrates the applicability of the framework in identifying the various feasible choices for the client organization to consider when they decide to customize their selected ERP product.

Further case studies need to be carried out in various contexts to acquire knowledge about the generalizability of the observations. This will also contribute to refining the proposed ERP customization framework.

Very few literature sources suggest methods for exploring and evaluating customization options in ERP projects from requirements engineering perspective. The proposed framework helps practitioners and consultants anchor the customization decisions on the customer's requirements and use a well-established prioritization technique, AHP, to identify the feasible customization choices for the implementing enterprise.

No previously published research studies provide an approach to prioritize customization choices for ERP anchored on the customer's requirements.

The use of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is an effective way to deal with qualitative decision areas of operations management. Four published applications of AHP are briefly reviewed in forecasting, supplier selection, facility location, and choice of technology. Furthermore, four more potential applications are suggested in other areas of operations management, including product design, plant layout, maintenance frequency selection, and choice of logistic carrier. In addition, suggestions for other areas of research are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a good insight into the use of fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (fuzzy AHP) approach that is a multi‐criteria decision‐making methodology in evaluating the benefits of information‐sharing decision problems.

In this study, the integration of AHP with the fuzzy synthetic extent analysis method (fuzzy AHP) is proposed in evaluating the benefits of information‐sharing decision problems as a framework to guide managers.

Findings demonstrate that the customer requirement and operational information alternatives are the preferred key decisions, which all supply chain partners might agree to share with one another. Further, it can also be concluded that the planning and financial information alternatives have almost the same importance.

Fuzzy AHP is a highly complex methodology and requires more numerical calculations in assessing composite priorities than the traditional AHP and hence it increases the effort. In addition, fuzzy methodology could be extended with the other multi‐criteria decision‐making (MCDM) methods such as Analytical Network Process (ANP), TOPSIS, ELECTRE and DEA techniques in solving such a problem.

There is a lack of research in the literature to deal directly with the uncertainty of human judgements in evaluating the benefits of various information‐sharing decisions in a supply chain. Therefore, fuzzy AHP is an appropriate methodology to select the various types of information and has the ability to be used as a decision‐making analysis tool since it handles uncertain and imprecise data. In addition, the paper is especially of interest to managers as they make decisions on which types of information they should share with their supply chain partners.

Refractory materials are now used in all major industries that demand high-temperature resistance, including petrochemicals, steel, cement and aviation. Businesses must decrease operating costs, enhance product technology, sell well and manage corporate risks in decision-making, notably supplier selection, to be more competitive. The study aims to determine the key criteria and factors of supplier selection and to evaluate the importance of the key factor of the supplier selection criteria for the refractory materials manufacturers in Taiwan.

Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is used to rank these factors for the decision maker. The AHP method is suitable for verifying refractory supplier selection criteria and providing references. The weighted loss scores for each supplier are then determined using the relative importance as the weights. Supplier selection criteria are ranked using their aggregate weighted loss scores. The provider with the lowest loss score should be chosen.

Product quality is the most significant of the five criteria: product quality, production technology, logistics capacity, service capability and supplier background. Professionalism is the most significant aspect of product quality, whereas equipment and capacity are vital in manufacturing techniques. The studies also show that the delivery rate is essential for logistics and service capabilities.

This research has important implications for refractory suppliers in promptly fine-tuning the production and service to enhance customer satisfaction, which is key to business sustainability.

The application of an AHP technique to a real-world industrial issue is what makes this research unique. This research addressed one of the most critical topics in supply chain operations by offering better judgement for supplier selection via the use of suitable quantitative methodologies.