Combining Swot and Ahp Techniques for Strategic Planning

A well-known technique in strategic planning is to gather and organize information regarding the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing the immediate and near future of an organization. This technique is usually called SWOT. Based on this information the organization must develop alternative plans and select the most convenient to its interests. It is assumed that previously to this process, for the appropriate evaluations of the plans, the organizations should have reviewed (and restate if needed) its mission, vision and values. The objectives of these plans should be to take most advantage of the strengths and opportunities, as well as to reinforce most the weaknesses and develop the best defense to the threats. As we can expect neither of the plans could be considered as dominant in the sense that it would be the best one with respect to all of the objectives. Consequently, we will be faced to the classical problem of relative preference between them. In this work, we propose to solve the problem by combining this technique with AHP in order to compare the alternatives. A case study is presented.