An application of the AHP in vendor selection of a telecommunications system

Vendor selection of a telecommunications system is an important problem to a telecommunications company as the telecommunications system is a long-term investment for the company and the success of telecommunications set-vices is directly affected by the vendor selection decision. Furthermore, the vendor selection of a telecommunications system is a complex multi-person, multi-criteria decision problem. The group decision-making process can be improved by a systematic and logical approach to assess priorities based on the inputs of several people from different functional areas within the company. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) can be very useful in involving several decision-makers with different conflicting objectives to arrive at a consensus decision. In this paper, an AHP-based model is formulated and applied to a real case study to examine its feasibility in selecting a vendor for a telecommunications system. The use of the proposed model indicates that it can be applied to improve the group decision making in selecting a vendor that satisfies customer specifications. Also, it is found that the decision process is systematic and that using the proposed AHP model can reduce the time taken to select a vendor. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.