Supporting the Supplier Scheduling Decisions in the E-Invoicing Implementation Projects - An Application of the ANP Method

In this paper, an ANP (Analytic Network Process) model is developed to aid a buyer company in prioritizing suppliers for adopting electronic invoicing. The case company is a leading Finnish textile and clothing design company. Because implementing e-invoicing with all the suppliers at the same time would require too many financial and other resources, it is necessary to schedule the implementations among the suppliers. Since the problem involves a lot of interconnected decision making criteria, the ANP method is considered suitable for this type of decision problem. The ANP model is constructed based on the business value concept as the main goal. As the result of analysis, the priorities between the suppliers are computed and the results can be applied to schedule the e-invoicing implementations among the supplier companies.