A Combined DEA and AHP Method for Efficient Product Management: Application on Solar Cell Product Management

Solar cell is an application of emerging renewable energies. It can offer cleaner and plentiful energy, but suffers from high production cost and low conversion efficiency. For maintaining the competitive advantage, the solar cell manufacturers should produce excellent solar cell products by limited resources. In order to select excellent solar cell products and establish efficient product management, in this study, we proposed a combined DEA and AHP method. The proposed method used DEA-CCR model, DEA-BCC model, DEA-super efficiency model to evaluate the efficiency of solar cell products, AHP rating method to evaluate the priority of solar cell products. A solar cell product's efficiency is DEA value of the product. A solar cell product's priority is AHP value of the product. DEA value and AHP value forms a solar cell product's combined value. The combined value is the basis of evaluating excellent solar cell product. The higher a solar cell product's combined value is, the more excellent the product is. It also means that the higher selecting priority it has. For illustration, a selection case of Korean company A's solar cell wafer product is employed. The results showed that the proposed method can serve as a helpful decision-aid tool for excellent product selection, and establish efficient product management.