Determining the Performance of Procurement Methods against Selection Criteria using Outranking - Satisfying Methodology

Abstract

The need to develop a decision support system to determine the most appropriate procurement route for a building project led to the development of various theoretical models. One of the foremost techniques was the multi-attribute utility approach (MAUA). In this technique, the arithmetic mean (averaging) method was used to fix the utility factors relating the procurement routes to each criterion. In this paper, the averaging method was subjected to further analysis using the outranking-satisfying technique to determine the correctness of the results derived from the averaging method used to fix the utility factors in the use of MAUA. The results showed that there is a significant difference between the rank-order of procurement methods against selection criteria by averaging and outranking-satisfying techniques. The use of outranking-satisfying analysis revealed that, the use of arithmetic mean to determine the utility factors can lead to inappropriate association of procurement routes with differing utility coefficients.

Keywords

• procurement method
• selection criteria
• utility factors
• multi-attribute utility
• outranking satisfying analysis.