Evaluation of criteria taken in account in the selection of OIZ by AHP-DEMATEL approach

Organized Industrial Zones (OIZs) provide SMEs with facilities such as land acquisition common infrastructure services and government incentives and provide significant advantages to enterprises in choosing their location. As it is observed that SMEs performing production in OIZs may have more performance and competitive power it can be said that OIZs are key role play in the development of both regional and national economy and increase the importance of selection of location. The aim of the study is to determination of criteria priorities and interaction between the criteria taken into account in the selection of OIZ location of establishment. In the study, AHP and DEMATEL methods were comparatively used to determination of criteria priorities and the DEMATEL method to modeling the interaction between criteria. In this direction, 56 pair-comparisons for DEMATEL and 28 bi-directional comparison data for AHP were analyzed by benefiting from the opinions of 26 managers/experts in Zonguldak Ereğli and Düzce OIZ in the Western Black Sea Region of Turkey. When the interaction/relationship between the criteria determined by DEMATEL method is examined, the "government attitude-incentive" criterion has been found to be generally influencing to other criteria and of "labor" and "establishment facilities" are generally affected by other criteria. In addition, "raw material", "market" and "transportation" criteria are also considered as the transition criteria interacting. According to the criteria weighted by DEMATEL and AHP methods, "government attitude-incentive" is the most important criterion and this criterion is followed by "market", "labor", "raw material", "establishment location", "transportation", "community characteristics" and "climate" criteria. Because of the criteria determined by DEMATEL and AHP differ from each other it was decided that the AHP method in the calculation of criteria weights the DEMATEL method was more suitable for determining the interaction between criteria. The fact that there is no study in which the application of DEMATEL method has been encountered in the selection of location OIZ increases the originality of the study.