If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -Evaluating and selecting the best among the offers provided by various suppliers is a complex problem that takes into account both tangible and intangible criteria, which incorporate interdependencies and feedback. The decision making is aggravated by the complexity of supply chain relationships and enterprise strategies especially within enterprise clusters. The aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive method for the evaluation and selection of suppliers' offers in parapharmaceutical industry clusters. Design/methodology/approach -The proposed approach consists of two parts. The former is the comprehension of the supply chain processes within the parapharmaceutical industry in Greece, and the latter is the use of an analytic network process (ANP)-based method for the selection of the best offer. Findings -The proposed approach enables the decision maker to visualize the impact of various criteria on the final outcome and documents the evaluation results in such a way that they can be communicated to various stakeholders. The results indicate that quality-related issues dominate the decision-making process in the parapharmaceutical industry.Research limitations/implications -The outcome of the model depends highly on the inputs provided by the decision maker. Moreover, the ANP method is computational intensive, but this limitation can be alleviated by appropriate software tools. Originality/value -The proposed framework is considered to be an innovative approach for the parapharmaceutical industry as well as enterprise clusters. The criteria set here may be used for nearly every similar industry consisting of active clusters (for example, the apparel industry).

PurposeThe integration of management systems is a common need nowadays, thus several paradigms exist in the bibliography for relevant efforts. However, the basic effort seems to be mainly at the direction of aligning processes and documents, taking into account only one of four typical views of organisations' modelling (the function view). Since the function view has been widely studied, this paper aims to focus on the organisation/decision view.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed approach focuses on the integrated management system (IMS) with respect to the organisation/decision view and offers a control mechanism which guarantees that requirements from all standards will be taken into consideration, while it proposes the use of a well‐known multi‐criteria decision making technique to support the decision makers. The paper focuses on the organisation/decision view, illustrated through a real case from the chemical industry.FindingsIt is concluded that the integration of management sub‐systems into one IMS should be done with respect to each one of the four enterprise modelling views, namely function, information, resource and organisation/decision view.Research limitations/implicationsThe proposed approach is general and can be applied to many integrated systems where decisions have to be taken. However, the selection of the analytic network process as a decision support tool implies that the decision involves both qualitative and quantitative criteria. In cases where only qualitative or only quantitative criteria exist, another decision support tool may be superior.Originality/valueThe originality of the paper stems from the consideration of the organisation/decision view rather than the function view that mostly appears in literature.

Features variety, variations among organisations' needs and the plethora of powerful project and portfolio management (PPM) information systems in the market, make the selection process among various PPM information systems a complicated process. The large number of the evaluation criteria involved during the decision aggravates the problem. This paper addresses the limitation of the number of criteria in such complex decision problems. It develops a hybrid model that exploits the benefits of the group analytic hierarchy process (GAHP) along with the simplicity of the scoring model for justifying the final selection. The proposed approach permits consideration of much more criteria than the typical AHP approach can

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