FUZZY AHP APPROACH TO THE COMPETENCE OF ENGINEERING MANPOWER OUTSOURCING

Outsourcing strategies reveal trends in strategic business administration. Over the past 80 years, outsourcing has become one of the most important concepts in business management and operation. In Taiwan, optoelectronics, semiconductors, and information technology (IT) are the major industries engaging in engineering manpower outsourcing (EMO) due to their capital intensity and their requirements for a large quantity of high-quality engineers. This study analyzes the EMO competence of Taiwan's enterprises using expert interviews, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) analysis, and a fuzzy logic inference system (FLIS). This study shows that EMO competence can be divided into three influential variables: cost, resources, and strategy. The results of this research indicate that the cost variable has the greatest influence on EMO. The results of fuzzy analysis demonstrate that if enterprises intend to improve their EMO, they must consider the combination of the direct cost and talents sub-variables within the resource variable to be more important than the various sub-variable combinations of cost and strategy. Moreover, empirical results also show that the internal operation (IO) sub-variable has a significant impact on the strategy variable and that the internal training (IT) and external alliance (EA) sub-variables have little influence on the strategy variable with respect to EMO.