EVALUATION OF SUGGESTIONS BY THE ANALYTIC HIERARCHY PROCESS: A CASE STUDY ON A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY IN MALAYSIA

Employee/customer suggestion systems have been used by many organizations to improve quality and productivity. However, the system lacks objective evaluation procedure that can be used to identify the best suggestions from a pool of suggestions. The present paper intends to fill up this gap by proposing absolute measurement technique of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as an objective methodology to evaluate suggestions. To show how the methodology works, 841 students drawn from six faculties of a public university in Malaysia were contacted and their suggestions pertaining to improvement of various services provided by the University's Instruction Division (ID) were collected. Altogether 150 different suggestions were obtained and all these were evaluated taking the inputs from the Dean of the ID. At the end of the AHP exercise, we identified 16 suggestions for implementation by the ID. The proposed methodology promises more applications to improve quality and productivity in organizations.