Q: I’m very new to AHP and I want to use it to identify which country is the best location to offshore a certain function of a company for my MBA project. I need to find relative importance of different factors for such decision and the relative ranking of different ountries from those factors.
How do I use this excel for such purpose? Do I run it multiple times; first for finding the priority of the factors, and then for the comparison of the countries one by one for each of the factors? And lastly multiply the priorities of the factors by each country’s priority? Is there an easier way via your template to do it?
A: There is no easier way. My template only calculates the priorities of factors in one single category of a hierarchy. If you have different categories, you have to run it multiple times (once in each category/ sub-category); then calculate the final weighting factors and make the evaluation of alternatives in your own sheet. NEW since Dec 2013: You might also use my online tool BMPSG AHP hierarchy.
I cannot generalize my template, as the hierarchy could be very different from one to another project.