The Analytic Hierarchy Process: A Methodology For Win- Win Management

Conflict resolution is the search for an outcome that represents for some participants as improvement from, and for noparticipants a worsening of, their present situation. Group decision making sessions often leads to conflict and loss of sight in particular when the problem is hard to structure and involves qualitative and quantitative criteria. Most executive managers face on daily basis problems that contain one or more of the above elements. They need scientific, but practical tools to help them in making rational decisions. This paper presents the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a scientific methodology was developed. The AHP can be described as an effective tool for decision making at the executive level of management. It addresses three aspects of decision making problems multi criteria, group decisionmaking, and conflict resolution. The AHP concept will be reviewed. How does it work? Practical examples of its applications are surveyed. The advantages of implementing the AHP are highlighted. 1. Concept of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) Decision-making involves criteria and alternatives to choose from. The criteria usually have different importance and the alternatives in turn differ in our preference for them on each criterion. To make such tradeoffs and choices we need a way to measure. Measuring needs a good understanding of methods of measurement and different scales of measurement. 4 Asma M. A. Bahurmoz Many people think that measurement needs a physical scale with a zero and a unit to apply to objects or phenomena. That is not true. Surprisingly enough, we can also derive accurate and reliable relative scales that do not have a zero or a unit by using our understanding and judgments that are, after all, the most fundamental determinants of why we want to measure something. In reality, we do that all the time and we do it subconsciously without thinking about it. Physical scales help our understanding and use of the things that we know how to measure. After we obtain readings from a physical scale, they still need to be interpreted according to what they mean and how adequate or inadequate they are to satisfy some need we have. However, the number of things we do not know how to measure is infinitely larger than the things we know how to measure, and it is highly unlikely that we will ever find ways to measure everything on a physical scale with a unit. Can we rely on our minds to be accurate guides with their judgments? The answer depends on how well we know the phenomena to which we apply measurement and how good our judgments are to represent our understanding. In our own personal affairs, we are the best judges of what may be good for us. In situations involving many people, we need the judgments from all the participants. In general, we think that there are people who are more expert than others in some areas are and their judgments should have precedence over the judgments of those who know less as in fact is often the case in practice. Judgments expressed in the form of comparisons are fundamental in our biological makeup. They are intrinsic in the operations of our brains. Comparisons imply that all things we know are understood in relative terms to other things. The question then is how do we make comparisons in a scientific way and derive from these comparisons scales of relative measurement? When we have many scales with respect to a diversity of criteria and sub criteria, how do we synthesize these scales to obtain an overall relative scale? Can we validate this process so that we can trust its reliability? These are all questions we need to consider in making a decision. It is useful to remember that there are many people in the world who only know their feelings and may know nothing about numbers and never heard of them but can still make good decisions, how do they do it? It is unlikely that by guessing at numbers and assigning those directly to the alternatives to indicate order under a criterion will yield meaningful priorities because the numbers are arbitrary and they would likely be from different scales. The foregoing questions were raised by T. Saaty whose answers provide a comprehensive definition of the concept of the AHP (Saaty, 1980 & 2004). AHP is a decision-making tool for dealing with complex, unstructured and multi criteria decision.