Abstract

Pharmaceutical industry caters to the health care needs through manufacturing drugs that cure diseases. With retailers being one of the customers in this industry, it is imperative for any pharmaceutical companyto address the issues concerning their preferences for these drugs to remain competitive in business. This prompts us to investigate the factors that influence their decisions in selecting the pharmaceutical products. This paper aims to identify those factors and rank them through application of analytical hierarchy process (AHP) with the support of the Expert Choice Software version 11.0. In this regard, six factors are identified, namely, quality of products, availability of products, variety of products, delivery deadline, flexibility in quantity, and competitive price that affect the purchasing decision of the retailers. The result indicates that among the chosen six factors, quality of products is ranked first followed by variety of products, availability of products, flexibility in quantity, competitive price, and delivery deadline. Inconsistency level as generated by the synthesis of AHP is found to be 9% that falls below the threshold value of 10%, signifying to the acceptability of the result. The implications of the findings on the part of the pharmaceutical companies and suggestions for future research are also put forward.

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