Author: Klaus

Welcome to BPMSG – Feb 2017

Concepts, Methods and Tools to manage Business Performance

Dear friends, dear visitors,

Using Google search for my own website, I could see a message like Your website is not mobile friendy. It was really time to update my website theme in order to make it better readable for visitors using their smart phone or tablet.

Now you see the new design using the standard wordpress theme from 2015. I simplified the menu structure to the categories:

  • AHP Articles – Material and Information about the Analytic Hierarchy Process
  • Other Articles – Material and Information about Business Performance
  • Tools – Links to my online tools, like the AHP online system and excel templates
  • Other – Posts related to other topics
  • About – Information about the author
  • Feedback – A place where you can leave your feedback as comments
  • Contact – A web form to contact me personally via e-mail

I hope with these changes navigation on the site is much easier, and you can find required information in shorter time.

Again, a big Thank You to all donors! Please note that the website is a non-commercial website for educational purposes. Your donation is used to cover running costs like web hosting, antispam services etc. PLEASE, help to support this website with a small donation. I spend a lot of time, sharing my knowledge for free. Thank you in advance!

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to leave a comment – it is always appreciated.

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, Februar 2017

BPMSG stands for Business Performance Management Singapore. As of now, it is a non-commercial website, and information is shared for educational purposes. Please see licensing conditions and terms of use.

Please give credit or a link to my site, if you use parts in your work, or make a small donation to support my effort to maintain this website.

About the author

AHP-OS and Farsi

Thanks to the feedback of a user from Iran, I found out that AHP-OS is working with RTL fonts like Farsi. It is important to add the semicolon to the right end of a node definition, and use latin punctuation marks, for example:

کاربری: مسکونی , تجاری , اداری ;

A simple decision hierarchy example looks like here:

farsi

Unfortunately, I am not able to check for a hierarchy with more than one level. If anyone could provide a 2 level hierarchy, I would appreciate. Arabic fonts should work too; kindly contact me, if you have an example.

 

Group Decision Making with AHP-OS

My AHP free online software AHP-OS has a feature to involve a group of decision makers to give their inputs to a decision problem. In contrast to my AHP Excel template, in AHP-OS the number of participants is practically unlimited. As of now, I see users having up to 100 participants in one project.

Other articles:

How to use AHP-OS for Group Decision Making?

As registered user you need to start with a new project by defining your decision hierarchy. In the Project Administration Menu click on New, define your hierarchy, Submit and Save as project. You have the possibility to give a short project description, explaining the project, before it is saved.

Continue reading Group Decision Making with AHP-OS

AHP Online Software CSV Data Export

AHP-OS allows for downloading your project data as a comma separated value text file. The following menus include a csv download key:

  • Hierarchy Input Menu – download the AHP hierarchy
  • Group Result Menu – download resulting priorities and consolidated (aggregated) decision matrix
  • Project Data Menu – download decision matrices for all individual participants

Depending on your regional settings of your PC, for each download you can select the decimal point or decimal comma as decimal separator.

Text encoding of the CVS file is UTF-8. If you are using country specific characters and Windows Excel, you can convert from UTF-8 to ANSI. Open the CSV file with notepad, and save as a new file with Encoding set to ANSI.

 

AHP Online Software – Decision Matrices – Update 2016-11-02

With the latest update of my AHP-OS online software you can now view and download the decision matrices of all participant. The group result menu was extended by a selection View Input Data:

g-result-menu

From there you reach the Project Detailed Input page, which shows the decision matrix for each individual participant and all nodes of the hierarchy:

projectinputdata

The project data menu has the button to download the data in csv format:

p-data-menu

The csv file contains the basic project data – Session Code, Project Name, Project description, Author, Date, Type of evaluation, Number of Participants – as well as all input decision matrices sorted by participant and nodes (categories of the hierarchy) or criteria for alternative evaluation.

With the Back link you can go back to the Group Result Page.

AHP Online Software – Latest Update 2016-10-29

Based on the request from some users I have modified the result display of my AHP-OS online software. Beside the resulting priorities it is now possible to see the underlying consolidated decision matrix, which results from the aggregation of individual judgments (AIJ) using the geometric mean.

Decision Hierarchies

For decision hierarchies the result page shows the resulting local and global priorities (overall result) in hierarchical form, and the global priorities in descending order in a bar graph.

Then, in a breakdown by nodes, consolidated priorities, consolidated decision matrix and the priorities of individual participants are shown:

ahp-result
As in this example, the consolidated matrix for one participant is the same as the AHP decision matrix.

Alternative Evaluation

For alternative evaluation the breakdown is done by criteria. It shows the consolidated preferences for all alternatives with respect to each of the criteria:

ahp-result1

In this example the House A from the alternative houses A, B, C has the best match with respect to the criterion “Size”.

Outlook

I am now working on the extension to let you download the complete set of input values, i.e. all underlying decision matrices, to excel. In the current version only the resulting AHP priorities are available.

Welcome to BPMSG – Oct 2016

Dear Friends, dear Visitors,

The analytic hierarchy process AHP remains the main topic of this website and continues to have the most visitors. As I continously receive quite a number of questions related to AHP, my AHP excel template and my AHP online software, I have summarized frequently asked questions (FAQs) in one posting here.

In between my online software was used by more than 3000 users, and has currently 500 active users. Please be reminded that after a period of 3 months inactive users will receive an re-activation email and be deleted, if they don’t reactivate their account.

A couple of months ago I added a Donation button to the website – see below. A big Thank You to all donors! Please note that the website is a non-commercial website for educational purposes. Your donation is used to cover running costs like web hosting, antispam services etc. PLEASE, help to support this website with a small donation. I spend a lot of time, sharing my knowledge for free. Thank you in advance!

For now, please enjoy your visit on the site and feel free to leave a comment – it is always appreciated.

Klaus D. Goepel,

Singapore, October 2016

BPMSG stands for Business Performance Management Singapore. As of now, it is a non-commercial website, and information is shared for educational purposes. Please see licensing conditions and terms of use.

Please give credit or a link to my site, if you use parts in your work, or make a small donation to support my effort to maintain this website.

About the author

AHP Frequently Asked Questions

Over the year I receive many questions about AHP, my AHP excel template and my AHP online Software. Here a selection of frequently asked questions:

General Questions

Q: I have 15 criteria and 20 alternatives, can you extend your template/software?
A: The excel template can handle up to 10 criteria, my online software is limited to 12 criteria (in one hierarchy level) and 10 alternatives. In principle it could be extended, but the limitation is inherit to the AHP method. Please read my explanations here.

Q: I have more than 10 alternatives, can I use AHP for priority evaluation of criteria and a different method for the evaluation of alternatives?
A: Yes, you can combine AHP for criteria evaluation with another method for alternative evaluation. Alternative evaluation could be done for example using a simple table with a yes/no or applicable/not applicable scale, or any other scale, e.g. Likert scale, how good the individual alternative matches the specific criterion.

Q: I have 150 participants, can I use your excel template/software?
A: My AHP excel template is limited to 20 inputs, my AHP online software can handle a (practically) unlimited number of participants. Use the AHP online software.

Q: How can I resolve the inconsistency (CR>0.1), when participants are done with their pairwise comparisons.
A: Once the pairwise comparison is done and submitted, data can not be changed and consistency ratio is what it is. Ask your decision makers to adjust their judgments  in direction of the most consistent input during the pair-wise comparisons for the highlighted three most inconsistent comparisons. Please see also my posting here.

Q: Can I use the Likert scale instead of the AHP scale?
A: No, AHP is based on the rational scale 1/9 … 1 … 9. It cannot be replaced by the Likert scale.

Q: Do you support Fuzzy AHP?
A: No, I have made no provisions to support Fuzzy AHP, neither in Excel, nor in my online software.

Q: How is the computation done, where do I find the description and formulas?
A: Please download the manual for the excel template, or the description about the  Software Implementation of AHP-OS.

Q: How can I cite your work, can you give me a reference?
A: Please cite my paper: Implementing the analytic hierarchy process as a standard method for multi-criteria decision making in corporate enterprises–a new AHP excel template with multiple inputs (Excel template) or my paper Software Implementation of AHP-OS.

AHP Excel template

Q: Can I extend the number of participants to more than 20?
A: Though it is possible in principle, the better way is to use my AHP online software with (practically) unlimited number of participants. I will not do a further extension of the template.

Q: Do you have a version of the Excel template w/o multiple inputs?
A: Yes, a simplified version is available on request from the author.

Q: How can I do alternative evaluation using your Excel template.
A: It is not possible. The template can only handle one category of a hierarchy and calculate the priority of one set of criteria.

AHP Online software

Q: If I have a group of decision makers, do they need to register for the online software?
A: No, they don’t need to register. As the owner of a project you get a link for group decision inputs. Simply send them the link, and they can start the pairwise comparisons.

Q: Can I erase/delete inputs from individual participants from the group results?
A: Yes, you can select and delete individual participants from a project .

Q: The alternative evaluation is not working?
A: Criteria evaluation (priorities) and alternative evaluation have to be handled as two different projects. Only when you have a decision hierarchy with completed comparisons and evaluated priorities, you can define the alternatives from the group result page clicking on Use consol. priorities. Define number and name of alternatives from there and save as new project. Hierarchy evaluation and alternative evaluation projects appear as type “H” for the first and type “A” for the latter in your project list.

Q: Can I get the source code of your online software?
A: Sorry, it is not an open source project.

Improving AHP consistency

In the implementation of both, AHP excel template as well as AHP online software, inconsistent judgments are highlighted and recommendations for consistent judgments are given.  How it is done, and what is the method behind?

The method is based on Saaty’s article “Decision-making with the AHP: Why is the principal eigenvector necessary“. European Journal of Operational Research 145 (2003) 85–91. He describes three methods how to transform a positive reciprocal matrix to a near consistent matrix.

In my implementation I construct the matrix εij = aij wj/wi to identify the three judgments for which εij is farthest from one. In Saaty’s paper it is shown as table 3, in my excel template it is called Consistency Error Matrix.  As I have to do it on each individual input sheet using as an approximation the RGMM (row geometric mean method) results, before calculating the eigenvector solution in the summary sheet.

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