**6. Conclusions**

Capability is the next important factor followed by System Effectives that is placed at the next level. The Organisational Encouragement is placed at layer four and the last important factor

108 Applications and Theory of Analytic Hierarchy Process - Decision Making for Strategic Decisions

The success of the suggestion scheme is related to the management support, practices, commitment and their leadership [35,58]. Truly, senior management ought to demonstrate their faith in the scheme, promote and support it and encourage all managers to view it as a positive force for continuous improvement [59]. Typically, the management support is seen as crucial to the implementation of ideas. For example, while a person can be creative and generate new ideas on her/his own, the implementation of ideas typically depends upon the approval, support and resources of others, which essentially calls for different forms of management support. If employees make a lot of suggestions, then the opportunity for them to be translated into implementations is greater when there are higher levels of support. Without senior level management support the workers will not be motivated to turn in

The management support is also very essential for the facilitation of communication mecha‐ nism within the organisation. Management, therefore, has a responsibility to satisfy this need for participation and create a culture which is supportive of employee involvement in the decisions that affect his or her work [61]. Thus, the leadership-employee relation is of top most

Secondly, the knowledge possessed by individual employees can only lead to a firm, compet‐ itive advantage if employees have the incentive and opportunity to share and utilize their individual knowledge in ways that benefit the organisation. Systems that capture the ideas and the capability of such system to evaluate them and provide necessary feedback and reward the employees for the suggestion are other core elements that are necessary once the top

Thirdly, organisations need to nurture the system by establishing mechanisms such as team works to improve the employee participation and must ensure that the right expertise and

The benefits of the suggestions must be visible. Therefore, it is important that the suggestions result in desired outcomes so these benefits are accrued, and such systems can be sustained. Often there will be organisational impediments that may have a negative impact which are normally the barriers to creativity and this factor has least importance specially because if the systems are the result of the vision of the leadership and resources are allocated to the functioning of the system, organisation impediments have a little scope to cripple the sustain‐

Each of the factors has a varied influence on the sustainability of the suggestion scheme and hence understanding the importance level identified by the AHP application of each of them would help the organisation to foster the factors accordingly for an improved performance and increase the effectiveness. Using AHP method, it is possible to identify the importance level of critical success factors and success barriers that have emerged in previous studies.

importance that can help the creativity practice to grow in the organisation.

supervision is provided to guide the employees to make their suggestions.

management and leadership support is obtained.

ability of the suggestion system.

is the System Barriers.

suggestions [60].

Managers should identify the potential benefits of maintenance policy in terms of productivity, quality and profitability. The latter is essential in order to achieve cost-effective decision making [55]. The proposed framework for the maintenance policy selection appears to enable the structured and systematic way of selecting the most appropriate maintenance policy. By upgrading the traditional AHP method with a EWMA chart for consistency test, our proposed framework for maintenance policy selection represents a valuable tool for decision makers in the field of maintenance.

The second case study showed that AHP method can be successfully applied to arbitrate the importance levels or ranks for the indicators in determining the sustainability of employee suggestion system. By using the proposed importance levels, organisations can assess the suggestion schemes for its sustainability and to recognise if the right conditions exist for the suggestion schemes to flourish.

However, we acknowledge the limitations of using the traditional AHP method. This method is often criticised because of its inability to adequately handle the uncertainty and imprecision associated with the mapping of the decision makers' perception to a crisp number [62]. Nonetheless, Karapetrovic and Rosenbloom [43] suggested that quality control approach can be used with any of the variations of AHP. Future studies could therefore consider different versions of AHP for maintenance policy selection through the lens of a quality management approach.
