Goal programming model

Question

Write an article on Goal programming model to address the selection of the best group of quality control instruments in designing a quality control system for service organizations.

Answer 1

Schniederjans and Karuppan had developed a goal-programming (GP) model to address the selection of the best group of quality control instruments in designing a quality control system for service organizations. Their simple scoring method was highly susceptible to the bias introduced by the initial solution and there are chances to adjust this bias and fix upon initial points. However, this method lacks consistency in results since individuals, being humans, alter their mind through reconsideration or process of learning. Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) has been recommended by Schniederjans and Karuppan to obtain initial estimate of priorities and accurately rank the importance of quality measures. Badri (2001) followed their recommendation and demonstrated how limitations in decision-making involving the selection of quality control instruments could be easily overcome by combining the AHP and GP models.

Badri (2001) employed the combined AHP-GP model for a large department store in evaluating seven alternatives to design a quality control system for customer data collection purposes. Initially the AHP was used as a stand-alone model. The five decision criteria included were reliability, responsiveness, empathy, assurance and tangibles and decision alternatives included large-scale mail survey of known customers, large-scale telephone survey of known customers, personal interviews while shopping, open-ended comment cards, point of purchase surveys to measure employee service delivery and product-line service delivery and small-scale telephone surveys of known customers. Pair wise comparisons between alternatives and criteria results in a matrix, which on application of right eigenvector method and synthesization, gave the priorities of those alternatives. Responsiveness and large-scale telephone survey of known customers obtained the highest ranks and preferences.

While using the combined model, the resource limitations like budgetary constraints, labor constraints were included in the model. The objective function minimized the estimated cost, management hours and employee hours and AHP was employed to determine the weights of the decision alternatives along the five criteria. The equations were generated and the model was solved using the LINDO software. The combined model gave importance to three criteria namely responsiveness, reliability and assurance and chose four alternatives namely point of purchase survey to measure employee service delivery, open-ended comment cards, small-scale telephone survey of known customers and large-scale mail survey of known customers. This result was contradictory to the AHP model.

The combined model thus gave a thorough decision process wherein it included completeness and non-bias nature of pair wise comparisons. The other major advantage of this model is consistent decision making. In addition, the drawbacks of GP were avoided. This method serves to be a favorable tool for the management of the department store, however the model must be refined continuously according to customer tastes and include any other resource constraints, if any.