AHP Spreadsheet

When working on a Six Sigma project, once you’ve obtained the voice of the customer, or other stakeholder, you’ll have a list of items that they say are important to them. But how important are they compared to one another? This question must be answered because you’ll want to devote more resources to the more important items.

We can answer this question using a technique called the Analytic Hierarchical Process, or AHP. AHP will provide quantitative weights to tell you the relative importance of each item so you can plan accordingly. Unlike arbitrary weights such as rankings, the weights you get using AHP can be used to help you determine which parts of your process will have the biggest impact on customer satisfaction.

What Is Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP)?

AHP asks people to compare items in pairs, which is a relatively easy thing for people to do. By mathematically manipulating these pairwise comparisons, AHP arrives at a weight for every importance item. The total of all of the weights adds up to 100%, which makes it easy to compare the weights to one another. For example, by asking a person to compare price to reliability, price to mileage, and reliability to mileage, AHP might calculate that a customer uses the weights shown when considering which automobile to purchase.

Why Is AHP Important?

AHP weights are ratio scale weights. Ratio scale numbers can be mathematically manipulated using addition, multiplication and so on. With AHP we can say something about how much more important A is than B. Most other schemes for obtaining importance weights produce results that are on a less powerful scale of measurement called an ordinal scale. Ordinal scale numbers can only be compared to one another, for example, you can say that A is more important than B, but you can’t say how much more important A is than B.

AHP Worksheet

Below is an AHP tool in a worksheet that you use to calculate importance weights for critical customer criteria.

If you are interested in AHP and would like to learn how to apply it in your Six Sigma project, please contact the Pyzdek Institute using the this form!

Comments

  • seid Ali June 26, 2020 at 5:46 am Reply

    hello sir or madam i want AHP sread sheet application

    • Thomas Pyzdek June 26, 2020 at 9:08 am Reply

      We’ll take a look at why the download file link isn’t working. Thanks for the heads up. Standby …

    • Juan Rivera June 26, 2020 at 10:00 am Reply

      Hi Seid,
      Did you click on Download File on the top, right-hand corner of the table?

      • Mehdi Hassan March 30, 2021 at 9:17 am Reply

        I clicked on download but it is not downloaded. Will you please assist me? I really need it.

  • Alfred December 6, 2020 at 1:08 pm Reply

    Hi Mr. Pyzdek,

    I have a question regarding pairwise comparison matrix. Is it normally 1-9, no matter how many pairs you have?
    Currently I am trying to work with 13 different pairs. Other than that, I don’t understand why some articles use 1,3,5,7,9 as scales and claim 2,4,6,8 as values for inverse comparison.

    Thank you in advance for your reply.

  • Tanji December 22, 2020 at 4:57 am Reply

    Hi
    I just download the AHP worksheet but the formulas do’t appear
    can you please send me a full workxheet ?
    thank you

    • Thomas Pyzdek December 22, 2020 at 8:55 am Reply

      Sorry, it has been many years since this post and I can not locate the original file.

  • ADNAN KARABULUT January 20, 2021 at 2:26 pm Reply

    I am a PhD student in Occupational Safety. Where can I find free ISM software or excel sheet for my article work? Can you help me? Thank you.

  • Thomas Pyzdek March 31, 2021 at 8:02 am Reply

    I clicked download now with a chrome browser on a mac and it downloaded for me.

  • Talha Munshi July 31, 2021 at 12:18 am Reply

    simply copy and paste this in MS excel.

  • EL ABYAD August 12, 2021 at 8:51 am Reply

    Bonjour Mr ,

    J’ai pas pu télécharger la feuille exel , Vraiment j’en est besoin ;
    Cordialement

  • Marta November 11, 2021 at 4:32 am Reply

    Hi,

    I have a question. Is not clear how to calculate the CI and CR worksheet for each factor. Can you help me please? Because I’m not able to download the file too.

    Best regards,
    Marta

    • Thomas Pyzdek November 15, 2021 at 11:52 am Reply

      This is a tool, not a tutorial on AHP. Search the internet for information on CI and CR, this link for example.

  • Hamdy Nabeih December 15, 2022 at 1:46 pm Reply

    Thank You Sir

  • sarthak December 19, 2022 at 12:17 am Reply

    how to edit this i want this please

    • Thomas Pyzdek December 19, 2022 at 10:21 am Reply

      You can download it from the link and edit it.

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