Comparing AHP and ANP: An Application of Strategic Decisions Making in a Manufacturing Company

Successful strategic decisions provide the appropriate operational actions for the right markets at the correct time. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis is a generally used tool which examines strengths and weaknesses of organization or industry together with opportunities and threats of the marketplace environment. SWOT framework provides the basic outline in which to perform analysis of decision situations. In this study, the lack of determination of the importance ranking for the SWOT factors, we proposed to enhance SWOT analysis with multicriteria decision making techniques called Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Analytic Network Process (ANP). AHP approach achieves pairwise comparisons among factors or criteria in order to prioritize them at each level of the hierarchy using the eigenvalue calculation. In addition to AHP, ANP technique is a general form that allows interdependencies, outerdependencies and feedbacks among decision elements in the hierarchical or non hierarchical structures. The main purpose of this paper is to explain how to use the AHP and ANP methods for prioritize of SWOT factors and compare them.