The Ship Management Firm Selection: The Case of South Korea

Although extant literature has stressed importance of the use of ship management and identified the selection factors, relative evaluation of comprehensive selection factors is found to be lacking. This study aims to evaluate the overall performance and rank of the ship management firms by adopting an integrated model of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (FTOPSIS) in order to support the critical decision making on SMF selection based on multiple criteria. This study contributes to enhancing the selection criteria of ship management firms by the ship-owners, and at the same time identifies the areas that the ship management firms require to improve their service standards. The result indicates that competency is the most important criterion, followed by cost, courtesy, organisation characteristics and image.