Illustrative example: a representative scenario, not a customer story
ERP System Selection
Compare enterprise resource planning platforms across cost, scalability, integration capability, and vendor support. Hierarchical weighting captures stakeholder priorities while distance-based ranking provides clear vendor differentiation.
The decision problem
Seven enterprise platforms are compared before a multi-year commitment. The criteria are not flat: cost splits into licence, implementation and maintenance, and integration splits by the systems already in place. Finance, IT and the operating units want different things, so the weighting is the part of the process that has to be defensible.
What the decision matrix looks like
The typical shape of a study like this. Your own matrix can be larger or smaller; nothing here is fixed.
7
Alternatives
5
Criteria
Conflicting stakeholder priorities
Uncertainty type
| # | Criterion |
|---|---|
| C1 | Total cost of ownership |
| C2 | Module coverage |
| C3 | Integration effort |
| C4 | Vendor support |
| C5 | User experience |
Which method, and why
AHP carries the criterion hierarchy natively, and its consistency ratio catches a set of stakeholder judgements that contradicts itself. TOPSIS gives a distance-based ranking with clear separation between vendors. WASPAS combines a weighted sum and a weighted product view; where those two disagree, the difference points to a vendor whose profile is uneven rather than uniformly strong.
What you get out
Ranking and scores
Every alternative with its score, its rank and the intermediate matrices that produced them.
Weight sensitivity
One criterion weight moves at a time, so you see exactly where the leader changes.
Method agreement
When more than one ranking method is run, the orders are compared with Spearman rho and Kendall W.
Report and citation
PDF, DOCX and XLSX output carrying the seminal source of every method used.
Run this flow on your own data
Load the matrix, choose the weighting and ranking methods, read the sensitivity.