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Top1. Introduction
Multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) is a process for making decisions in the case of multiple, often conflicting, criteria. Many areas use multi-criteria decision making as a useful technique. (Gavade, 2014).
Performance measurement criteria, i.e., performance metrics or KPIs, are often used in a variety of domains to either reveal performance deficit or improve a certain process (Shahin & Mahbod, 2007). In the literature, it is recommended that KPIs satisfy the SMART criteria Doran, 1981) (Shahin & Mahbod, 2007) and we consider crucial to use one of the most popular methods for multiple criteria decision making such as the Analytic Hierarchy Process method (AHP)(Podgórski, 2015). The purpose of this research is to assess the quality of indicators by comparisons and to set priority areas for additional KPI development or improvement.
The improvement in performance is based on an efficient definition and selection of appropriate measurements. The method is used successfully in many areas (hotel case study (Shahin & Mahbod, 2007), occupational safety and health management systems (Kerzner, 2017), enterprise analysis model (EAM) process (Yaghoobi & Haddadi, 2016), a telecommunications industry case (Peral et al, 2017) higher education institution (Amole, 2016), public teaching hospitals in Southwest Nigeria (ORTEGA, 2012)). In the Business Process Management research area, the concept of Business Process (BP) is essential since it serves to understand how a business operates and what opportunities exist for making its activities more efficient (Dumas et al, 2013). In addition, Dumas et al. note that time, cost, quality, and flexibility are the typical performance perspectives of BP performance measurements.
The AHP method includes a multi-criteria decision and it seems very suitable to our selection problem for many reasons.
First, it permits reaching an agreement on a coherent set of KPIs that do not conflict but ideally support business process goals and that meets the needs of as many stakeholders as possible, with subjective judgments from a decision-maker or an expert. Second, the few numbers of criteria (SMART) are considered in this work as appropriate to structure the decision maker’s mind in order to provide a systematic prioritization of sustainability performance indicators. Third, we don’t need an absolute scale that requires much domain experience but relative values (e.g. less/more; somewhat, very) in opposition to classical measurement. Fourth, the AHP method allows to keep in our approach a logical consistency of the judgments used to detect when KPIs preference is inconsistent. Fifth, the main point offered by AHP related to the relative priority of each criterion to obtain the best KPI according to the identified business process goal and the synthesis provides a general assessment of the desirability of each KPI.
The need for a methodology in selecting KPIs for business process analysis has been increasing. The reason is that business process analysis seeks to determine what to measure in order to improve KPIs and business processes. Moreover, this selection is generally contextual where the lack of understanding of the performance measures leads to a failure in monitoring and reporting of measures.
Thus, the following research challenges are considered in this paper:
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How to provide a methodological support for discovering KPIs and enhancing the definition of existing once?
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How to ensure that indicators are SMART?
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How to cover quantitative and qualitative aspects in the evaluation of performance?