A model for standardizing human decisions concerning service-contracts management

Abstract

Increased expectations of today's customers are causing businesses to offer a variety of warranty contracts for their products. Because of the intense customer contact that takes place during the process of supporting a contract, the planning for contracts has to not only contend with the unpredictable and low demands of the service parts, but must also rely on human decision-making concerning a number of subjective factors. These subjective factors, which are related to the customer, the contract and the contracted product, have seldom been considered in the literature on inventory planning. Moreover, the evaluation of subjective factors often becomes non-standardized and non-coordinated among the geographically dispersed decision-makers of an organization, as was the situation with a Fortune 100 company's case that motivated this paper. We propose a combination of a heuristic procedure along with the Analytical Hierarchy Process technique that has not been applied in the inventory-planning setting. We also demonstrate how a Web-based information system can be used to standardize the decision process, and discuss the implications of the system on the motivational case. Computational results are also provided to show the effectiveness of the heuristics.

A fuzzy preference relations model for evaluating key supplier relationships in TFT-LCD TV panel manufacturing industry

“…For instance, AHP has emerged as a popular and practical tool for decision making, but it suffers from consistency problems (Wang and Chang, 2007). Sundarraj (2006) suggests that because decision makers specifying preferences in distributed locations will make incorrect decisions when utilizing the AHP approach, many organizations' applications of the AHP approach vary significantly. Tavana et al (2010) noted that there has been criticism of AHP in the operations research literature, including preference reversals, because of the questionable theoretical basis.…”

An analytical model for building brand equity in hospitality firms

“…For instance, AHP has emerged as a popular and practical tool for decision-making, but it still suffers from consistency problems (Wang and Chen 2007). Sundarraj (2006) discussed that because of decision-makers specifying the preferences in distributed locations will make wrong decision when utilizing AHP approach, many organizations tend to apply AHP approach vary considerably. Moreover, Tavana et al (2010) concluded that there has been some criticism of the AHP in the operations research literature including preference reversals because of questioned the theoretical basis, and therefore, they proposed a new multi-criteria decision analysis model to avoid the controversies associated with rank reversal.…”

Retail service for mixed retail and E-tail channels

“…Yao and Liu (2005) studied competitive pricing of mixed retail and e-tail distribution channels for the Bertrand and the Stackelberg models, they proposed an appropriate strategy for the decision maker to adopt when adding an e-tail channel. Sundarraj (2006) focused on offering a variety of warranty contracts to investigate customer's strategy.…”