A MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION ANALYSIS APPROACH TO PALLET SELECTION: DEVELOPMENT OF A MATERIAL-OF-CONSTRUCTION EVALUATION MODEL

• Chama Chama University of the Witwatersrand
• Kevin Harding University of the Witwatersrand https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2708-4323
• Jean Mulopo University of the Witwatersrand https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9786-6799
• Paul Chego University of the Witwatersrand https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3567-5027

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7166/32-3-2614

Abstract

Although pallets have traditionally been constructed from wood, there has been a shift towards making them from plastic and other composite materials. Subsequently, the storage and transportation industry has been inundated with questions about ‘the best’ pallet material type in relation to a supply chain. In addition, in a rapidly changing global manufacturing and storage environment, industry players have difficulty justifying the high capital cost of adopting new state-of-the-art pallets. This paper seeks to build a model to identify the best pallet material-of-construction (MOC) as perceived by the end consumer. The approach used for this was based on different stages of building an assistive multi-criteria decision model. This included modelling the decision framework using the analytic hierarchy process and undertaking an independent case study as the baseline for the modelling.