Page 197 - The Six Sigma Project Planner

Figure 35. Matrix of Categories for Pairwise Comparisons
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Created using Expert Choice 2000 Software, www.expertchoice.com.

For our analysis, we will assign verbal labels to our pairwise comparisons; the verbal
responses will be converted into numerical values for analysis. Customers usually find
it easier to assign verbal labels than numeric labels. All comparisons are made relative
to the customers’ goal of determining which product they will buy, which we assume is
synonymous with our goal of determining where to focus product upgrade efforts. The
highlighted cell in the matrix compares the ‘easy to learn’ attribute and the ‘easy to use
quickly after I’ve learned it’ attribute. The customer must determine which is more
important to him or her or if the two attributes are of equal importance. In this example,
our customer indicates that ‘easy to learn’ is moderately to strongly preferred over ‘easy
to use quickly after I’ve learned it’ and the AHP software has placed a +4 in the cell
comparing these two attributes. (The scale goes from –9 to +9, with ‘equal’ being
identified as a 1.) The remaining attributes are compared one by one, resulting in the
matrix shown in Figure 36.

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Although the analysis is easier with special software, you can obtain a good approximation using a
spreadsheet. See the Appendix for details.

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