How a halal culinary tracking app was scoped with pairwise comparisons instead of guesswork.
Requirements gathering often ends the same way. A workshop produces a long list of features, nobody agrees on the order, and the loudest opinion wins. A study on halal culinary tracking took a more deliberate route, borrowing a decision method from operations research to set its priorities.
The application being designed serves a food souvenir centre, where shoppers want to confirm that a product is halal before buying. In Indonesia that confirmation has a paper trail. LPPOM MUI handles formal certification, while regional MUI offices issue a halal promise certificate for producers who are not yet certified. The app's job is to make that status visible on a phone.
The Analytical Hierarchy Process works by comparison rather than rating. Five experts judged criteria against each other in pairs, and software called Criterion Decision Plus converted those judgements into weights. A consistency check guards the result, and in this case every ratio came in below 0.1, the usual threshold.
Read together, the two rankings line up. The experts put usability first among criteria and simplicity first among strategies, which gives a team a clear instruction: build the shortest path from opening the app to seeing a producer's halal status, and treat decoration as a later concern.
There are limits worth naming. Five respondents is a small panel, and the field work ran from September 2015 to January 2016 in one city. Weights are opinions with arithmetic applied, not measurements, and a different panel would shift them. The value of publishing the numbers is that the reasoning can be checked and repeated.
Sucipto et al. (2018). Halal Culinary Tracking Application at Food Souvenirs Center Based on Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) Method. Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities.
For teams facing a similar argument about scope, the takeaway is portable. When priorities have to be settled, compare options in pairs, check the consistency of the judgements, and write down the weights. It costs a few meetings and removes a lot of rework.
