OPTIMAL SELECTION OF PROGRAM SUPPLIERS FOR TV COMPANIES USING AN ANALYTIC NETWORK PROCESS (ANP) APPROACH

In today's increasingly competitive business world, selecting and evaluating the suppliers is one of the most important activities of a company. In the Taiwanese TV industry, selecting optimal suppliers of programs is also vital. But few attempts have so far been made to address this specific point. After reviewing the literature, we collect criteria for the selection of a program supplier. Considering the interdependence among the selection criteria, the analytic network process (ANP) is applied to help Taiwanese TV companies to effectively select optimal program suppliers. To avoid the complicated computing process from additional pairwise comparisons of the ANP, we retain the 12 critical criteria according to the opinions of the 44 senior executives about the importance of criteria: Quality, On-time, Marketability, Reputation, Rating, Finance, Relationship, Attitude, Communication, Creativity, Price and Time. Subsequently, we discuss with senior executives to group these criteria into 4 perspectives to structure the hierarchy for the selection of program suppliers. According to the hierarchy based on 4 perspectives and 12 vital criteria, Taiwanese TV companies could select optimal program suppliers more effectively. Moreover, the practical application of the ANP presented in Section 4 is generic and also suitable to be exploited for Taiwanese TV companies.