Katherine Miller is a senior in the department of information technology at Tech. For the past few months she has been involved in the job search process. She has an excellent résumé, with a high grade point average and a strong record of campus participation in clubs and activities. As a result, she has had a number of good interviews with various companies. She now has job offers from five companies—American Systems Developers, Anderssun Consulting, National Computing Software Systems (NCSS), the Gulf-South Company, and Electronic Village.

American Systems Developers and Anderssun Consulting are both large national consulting firms with offices in several major cities. If Katherine accepted the offer of either of these firms, she would primarily work on project teams assigned to develop decision support and information systems for corporate clients around the country. If she went with American Systems Developers, her home base would be in Atlanta, and if she accepted Anderssun’s offer, she would be located in Washington, DC. However, in both cases she would be traveling a great deal and could sometimes be on the road at a client location for as much as 6 to 9 months. NCSS is a software and computer systems development company with a campus-like location in Chicago. Although her job with NCSS would involve some traveling, it would never be more than several weeks at any one time. Gulf-South is a bank holding company that operates eight different banks and its various branches in six southeastern states. If Katherine accepted Gulf-South’s offer, she would be located in Tampa, where she would work in operations systems. She would be involved in developing information and support systems for bank operations, and she would have minimal travel. Electronic Village is a national chain of discount stores specializing in electronic products, such as televisions, DVRs, CD players, MP3 players, and computers. Her job with Electronic Village would be at its corporate headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, where she would develop and maintain computer systems to be used for inventory control at the hundreds of Electronic Village stores across the country. She would be required to travel very little.

American Systems Developers has offered Katherine a starting salary of $38,000 annually, and Anderssun Consulting has offered her $41,000 per year. NCSS has offered her an annual salary of $46,000, whereas Gulf-South has offered her $35,000 per year, and Electronic Village has offered her a salary of $32,000 per year.

Katherine is having a difficult time making her decision. All the companies have excellent reputations, are financially healthy, and have good opportunities for advancement. All are demanding in terms of the workload they require. All five companies have given Katherine only a few weeks to make a decision regarding their offers.

Katherine has decided to use the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to help decide which job offer she should accept. She has developed a list of criteria that are important to her in deciding which job to take. The criteria, in no particular order, are (1) salary; (2) cost of living in the city where she would be located; (3) amount of travel associated with her job; (4) climate (weather) where she would be located; (5) entertainment and cultural opportunities, including sports, theater, museums, parks, and so on; (6) universities where she can work on an MBA degree part time and at night; (7) the crime rate in the city where she would live; (8) the nature of the job and what she would be doing; and (9) her proximity to friends and relatives. Katherine realizes that she has very limited information on which to compare the five jobs, based on most of these criteria, so she knows she needs to go to the library and do some research, especially on the five different job locations.

Put yourself in Katherine’s shoes and, using all or some of her criteria and your own preferences and knowledge, develop an overall ranking of the jobs, using AHP.