An application of the AHP in vendor selection of a telecommunications system

Vendor selection of a telecommunications system is an important problem to a telecommunications company as the telecommunications system is a long-ter m investment for the company and the success of telecommunications set-vice s is directly affected by the vendor selection decision. Furthermore, the v endor selection of a telecommunications system is a complex multi-person, m ulti-criteria decision problem. The group decision-making process can be im proved by a systematic and logical approach to assess priorities based on t he inputs of several people from different functional areas within the comp any. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) can be very useful in involving s everal decision-makers with different conflicting objectives to arrive at a consensus decision. In this paper, an AHP-based model is formulated and ap plied to a real case study to examine its feasibility in selecting a vendor for a telecommunications system. The use of the proposed model indicates t hat it can be applied to improve the group decision making in selecting a v endor that satisfies customer specifications. Also, it is found that the de cision process is systematic and that using the proposed AHP model can redu ce the time taken to select a vendor. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All ri ghts reserved.