Group decision support for defining the vision and strategic goals for distribution logistics

A vision articulates the desired future state for the logistics functions in a company. During the logistical visioning process, different scenarios are formed and evaluated taking into account the objectives and strategies of the various interest groups. The vision is then transformed into strategic goals, i.e. specific long-term performance targets. The visioning process is unstructured by nature and many decision makers are usually involved. In the paper, we present a group decision support system (GDSS) based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for defining the corporate logistical vision and strategic goals. The developed GDSS enables decision makers to approach the visioning process analytically, to represent the connections between multiple, both tangible and intangible, variables and the different scenarios in the form of a hierarchy, and to assign priorities to the elements in the hierarchy