Decision support framework for procurement system in University of Babylon

Abstract

The procurement activities in organisations typically involve critical decisions made by managers. In order to make a good decision, they need to assess certain relevant criteria. Procurement decision-making faces several challenges such as selecting the best vendor with the right mix of product, price and method to procure it. After studying three multi-criteria decision techniques that have been widely used in procurement decisions, namely, the multi-attribute utility theory, Linear Goal Programming and analytic hierarchy process techniques AHP which is the technique that identified as the foundation on which to build a decision support system for procurement decisions in the University of Babylon, Iraq as a case study. A prototype is developed to realise the use of this DSS framework at the university. The research attempts to address the issues regarding information fusion by automatically integrating multiple information sources to enhance the procurement decision-making process through empirical and theoretical findings on the interdependencies that characterise the relationships between information fusion and management decision-making. A pre-implementation study is carried out in order to ascertain the usefulness of this framework in promoting user-centred decisions by explaining the various influences of different decision-making on the information systems and procurement processes at the University of Babylon, Iraq. The major contribution of this study is to develop tools that aid practitioners in decisionmaking processes regarding procurement decisions such as DSS planning, DSS technique identification and implementation, and how to design a DSS framework. The outcome of this study can be applied across all systems engaged in decisionmaking processes regarding procurement.