Deploying the ELECTRE III and MACBETH multicriteria ranking methods for SMEs tactical performance improvements

Abstract

Purpose – Industrial companies are continuously looking to improve their business turn-over and choose improvement actions to achieve this objective. Legitimating this choice by only a strategic financial point of view currently has some limits, because additional ones such as quality, delay, resources needs have also to be taken into account. The multicriteria decision aid (MCDA) approaches have been developed to deal with problems such as ranking, sorting or quantification. The purpose of this paper is to describe the operational aspects in MCDA deployment through a case study submitted by the SME Fournier Company. Design/methodology/approach – This paper concerns analytical overall performance models to allow the decision-makers (DMs) to select potential actions to launch regarding given decision criteria. The principles of the main MCDA approaches, outranking and aggregation, are presented. Then representative MCDA methods, ELECTREIII and MACBETH, are successively deployed to a tactical decision problem of business turn-over increase. From the building of their respective preference modelling, decision aid is provided in the form of preference relation or performance function. Findings – A formal framework supplying information to the industrial DMs in order to legitimate the action selection is described. In addition, the DMs feedback highlights the required expertise for the preference modelling. Practical implications – The article gives a guideline for industrial practitioners to carry out ELECTREIII and MACBETH for their improvement action selection. Originality/value – SMEs can find an adapted framework for their improvement actions choice dealing with financial and non-financial criteria. It is also enriched by practical considerations concerning the methods deployment for tactical decision problems.