Assessing and ranking HALMAS parks in Malaysia: An application of importance-performance analysis and AHP

This paper aims to measure the level of importance and satisfaction on a number of items in the day-to-day running of the halal parks in Malaysia and to rank a selected halal parks on the basis of a number of performance criteria.

An importance-performance analysis (IPA) approach was adopted to focus on the areas requiring remedial actions for the halal parks. Further, the HALMAS (the accredited halal parks) parks ranking criteria have been identified and the absolute measurement process of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been applied to complete the ranking exercise.

IPA surfaced 16 items that require remedial actions for successful operations of HALMAS parks; these are related to infrastructure, facilities, logistics, local support authorities and the role of halal develop corporation. On the other hand, there were seven criteria to rank the HALMAS parks.

Because of limited availability of data, the researchers could not rank all the 13 HALMAS parks in Malaysia rather only eight parks were evaluated.

The findings of the research were presented before the management of the parks and they shared their views that the findings gave them the clear road map of implementing improvement activities that will bring higher effectiveness in running the parks.

This is the pioneering attempt to rank HALMAS parks in Malaysia by applying a scientific method such as AHP. The type of application of a hybrid method (IPA and AHP) that is presented in the paper can also be extended to similar situations.