Well-designed packaging is intended to present a product in the best possible way, which would have a significant impact on sales improvement. Creating and finding the ideal design solution for packaging is an extremely complex process. Many characteristics of a packaging design can affect the level of customer satisfaction, where the different characteristics of the packaging tend to have a different significance. To make the problem more complex, the significance of characteristics of a packaging design is not the same for all customers. Therefore, creating and finding the ideal design solution for packaging often involves an evaluation of a number of variants, typically evaluated on the basis of multiple criteria, often with different significance. To provide an efficient approach for the selection of appropriate packaging, a framework for selecting the appropriate packaging design which meets customer preferences, based on the SWARA method and group decision making, is proposed. The usability and efficiency of the proposed framework is considered in the case of the selecting the appropriate packaging design for the wine of the autochthonous grape variety called Black Tamjanika. On the basis the considered examples, it can be concluded that SWARA method can be successfully used to solve many similar problems, and that in some cases may have some advantages over similar methods, such as AHP method or Conjoint Analysis. As an advantage of the proposed procedure can be mentioned a much smaller number of comparisons in pairs, compared with the AHP method, and much more comprehensible procedure for selecting the most acceptable alternative, compared with Conjoint Analysis. The proposed framework can also be easily adjusted to solve a significant number of MCDM problemsDOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ee.26.2.8820

In the literature, many multiple criteria decision making methods have been proposed. There are also a number of papers, which are devoted to comparison of their characteristics and performances. However, a definitive answer to questions: which method is most suitable and which method is most effective is still actual. Therefore, in this paper, the use of some prominent multiple criteria decision making methods is considered on the example of ranking Serbian banks. The objective of this paper is not to determine which method is most appropriate for ranking banks. The objective of this paper is to emphasize that the use of various multiple criteria decision making methods sometimes can produce different ranking orders of alternatives, highlighted some reasons which lead to different results, and indicate that different results obtained by different MCDM methods are not just a random event, but rather reality.

Until now, many different multiple criteria decision-making methods have been proposed for the facilitation of different business problems such as entrepreneurial. In this article, a new approach for selecting the most acceptable alternative is considered, which is based on the integration of weighted sum and weighted product approaches. The basic idea of the newly proposed approach is partly based on the multiobjective optimization by ratio analysis plus the full multiplicative form method, but also includes some features of the weighted aggregated sum product assessment and combined compromise solution methods. The proposed method is tested by using two illustrative examples that are related to the contractor and industrial robot selection. Additionally, to test its reliability, the obtained results are compared with the ones gained by using the multiple-criteria decision-making methods of the first and second generations. The proposed method predicts the application of a much simpler normalization procedure, involves four utility measures for defining the overall utility of alternatives, and enables a much easier ranking of them. The final conclusion is that the simple weighted sum product method is easy to use and contributes to the increasing of the reliability of decisions that are made. Therefore, the proposal uses a much simpler normalization procedure, i.e., four utility measures for determining the overall utility of alternatives, and allows a much easier ranking of alternatives.

The application of information technology in all areas represents a significant facilitation of all business processes and activities. A competitive business system is hardly imaginable without adequate information technology. Therefore, this paper evaluates the conditions for the implementation of barcode technology in a warehouse system of a company for the manufacture of brown paper. SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) matrix was formed with a total of 27 elements based on which the benefits of the implementation of barcode technology in the warehouse system need to be analysed. For this purpose, a new fuzzy PIPRECIA (PIvot Pairwise RElative Criteria Importance Assessment) method has been developed to evaluate all elements in SWOT matrix. In addition, a part of the new developed approach includes new fuzzy scales for criterion assessment that are adapted to the methodology required by the fuzzy PIPRECIA method. To determine the consistency of the method, Spearman and Pearson correlation coefficients are applied. The results obtained in this study show that weaknesses are most noticeable in the current system. By implementing barcode technology, it is possible to create opportunities defined in SWOT matrix, which, in a very efficient way, allow elimination of the current weaknesses of the system.