AHP Enterprise is a powerful tool for making decisions, especially where you have multiple competing business drivers or multiple stakeholders. By structuring your decision analysis, you can make a quicker, more rational decision with lower risk.
There are three main steps in making a decision;
- Build your decision model
- Evaluate your alternatives (the possible outcomes of your decision)
- View results and make a decision
The main dashboard is set out so you know what actions to take at each step in the process.
Build your model
To build your model, you need to go through several steps.
- Define the criteria you will use to evaluate your alternatives
- Define questions types - these are the questions you will use to score your alternatives against the criteria. The most common way to do this is using scales though sometimes you may want to use "outside data" (e.g. technical data). We call this kind of data attributes. Finally, you might choose to use pairwise comparison. This is particularly useful for highly subjective judgments that are relative (e.g. I prefer this colour to that one).
- Set up your alternatives. Alternatives are the options you're trying to choose between. They might be vendors, sites for your new warehouse, candidates for that VP role or anything else you're choosing.
Evaluation
This is where you involve your stakeholders and subject matter experts in the decision.
To do this, you need to run two types of survey.
- Criteria weighting surveys let your stakeholders work out which criteria are most important. To do this, the software asks them to compare pairs of criteria and to indicate which is more important (and by how much). This process helps build consensus and understanding amongst your stakeholders leading to better quality decisions that enjoy more buy-in. The software uses the stakeholder input to calculate the criteria weighting that best fits the stakeholders' answers.
- You need to also score your alternatives against your criteria. Again, this is done via a survey. This gives your subject matter experts the chance to have their say and the software automatically aggregates all the data.
NOTE: If you are using attributes, you still need to include those criteria in your surveys. Including a criterion in a survey is how you tell TransparentChoice that you want to include those criteria in your results.
Results
Once you've done all the evaluation, you can look at results. TransparentChoice lets you see which of your alternatives is most attractive / provides most value. You can plot your alternatives on a scatter chart (so, for example, you can see value for money), do sensitivity analysis and more.
This tutorial will show you how to do this.