A Decision Making Model for Outsourcing Maintenance Activities in an Iranian Military Organization

Military organizations that use more modern and complex armaments and instruments respect to advances in technology, have to adopt systems with high reliability and flexibility to increase their level of availability, reliability and ability to fight.The relationship between maintenance activities and core business activities, make maintenance activities play an important role in organizations. On the other hand, one of the main concerns that organizations are engaged with, is decision making for outsourcing of maintenance activities. Other than all of the advantages mentioned about outsourcing, it is not possible to deal with this matter as a constant prescription for all organizations. Until now, most of the studies focused on factors, special considerations, phases and steps in outsourcing and how to become successful through these stages.The goal of this project is to develop a decision making model for outsourcing the maintenance activities on automotive items in an Iranian military organization. This model is developed based on the method “Analytical Network Process (ANP)” and in data gathering process, techniques like; interview, studying books, journals, papers and related documents, internet research and questionnaire are utilized.This model, by answering the question “Whether maintenance activities should be performed in the organization or out of the organization?”, act as a Decision Support System (DSS) for managers.