Your task is to provide guidance in an office car purchase problem that your boss has been struggling with (three possible alternatives need to be evaluated). The boss wants the decision to be made based on price, fuel efficiency, prestige and comfort. The seller of the car has only provided quantitative information on the price dimension and fuel efficiency dimension but not on the other two dimensions of interest i.e., prestige and comfort. You remembered the very neat approach called AHP that you learned in your OM/EM 371 course, and thought you would give it a try. You felt that the approach would bring structure into decision problems involving several alternatives and decision attributes (characteristics) when informational uncertainty/complexity is involved, and when you do not have enough quantitative information available. You therefore decided to apply AHP in evaluating the cars along the four characteristics/dimensions: price, fuel efficiency, prestige and comfort. In a first preparatory step, you have already obtained all quantitative information available from the seller. The information regarding prestige and comfort was obtained by your colleagues from trade journals. You consulted with your procurement colleagues and let them evaluate how each alternative stacks up against the others for each evaluation criterion (you had them do the pairwise comparisons). The summary of this preparatory step is provided below.

Alternatives Price Fuel Efficiency (mpg) Prestige Comfort

Avalon 15000 26 low good

Babylon 18000 28 fair fair

Carryon 24000 20 high high

While information for comparing the three alternatives was somewhat easy to obtain, the relative importance of the individual attributes for your organization was difficult to derive. Therefore, you asked your colleagues to have a meeting to make pairwise comparisons of the attributes and communicate the findings. The summary findings are as follows. Pairwise comparison of attributes: In terms of prestige, your colleagues have indicated to you that prestige is moderately preferred to fuel efficiency, moderately to strongly preferred to comfort, and very strongly preferred to cost. Further comfort is moderately to strongly preferred to both price and fuel efficiency. Lastly, fuel efficiency is equally to moderately preferred to price. Based on this information, you have mapped out the following plan of action [these are also the deliverables for this assignment]: 1. Draw the decision hierarchy (diagram) 2. Evaluate the attributes, and provide an assessment on the consistency of the statements (identify the statements that yield inconsistent results and explain why those are inconsistent) 3. Evaluate the suppliers against each attribute, and provide an assessment on the consistency of the statements. 4. As a last step, you plan on putting it all together and calculating the final weights for each alternative, providing guidance on which one should be chosen.

Deliverable

As a deliverable, you are asked to upload your complete Excel spreadsheet to the assignment submission folder for this assignment on Moodle. The spreadsheet must contain all calculations necessary to solve the AHP problem. Make sure you show and address all four deliverables noted on the first page. Make sure that all formulas are visible (without the visible formulae there will not be any credit), and that your work is logical (i.e., that I can follow your though process), and you give rationale for your ratings. All ratings that are not based on objective quantitative information must follow the 1-9 scale that we discussed in class. I encourage/expect you to make annotations and comments, and provide the information in a structured fashion these will be given due credit. In a textbox at the end of your calculations in the excel spreadsheet, provide a brief overall decision/recommendation on which supplier to go with, and any other points that you feel are worth mentioning