Prioritizing Key Internal Strategic Factors for Long-term Competitiveness of Medium-sized Shipyards using the DEMATEL-ANP Method

• Key internal strategic factors for medium-sized shipyards in national shipbuilding play an important role in addressing the issue of competitiveness. • A hybrid multiple-criteria decision analysis using DEMATEL-ANP approach to establish interrelationship between strategic factors and key internal factors for evaluating the prioritization of key internal factors. • Business network is more important than profit margin, delivery time, quality assurance, and price level to sustain the business competitiveness. This study reports the critical aspect of competitive strategy in Indonesian medium-sized shipyards. The inferior competitiveness of the national shipyard industry poses challenges at business, corporate, and functional levels. The significance of the strategic factors for medium-sized shipyards in national shipbuilding development has been demonstrated by previous researchers. However, the dependency among the factors remains unclear. This research aim to fill the gap by describing and examining network dependency among the factors, utilizing a multi-criteria decision analysis approach through Decision Making Trial Evaluation and Laboratory (DEMATEL). Furthermore, an analytical network process (ANP) was utilized to prioritize the most crucial competitive factors. The results have provided compelling evidence for the long-term competitiveness of shipyards by employing a hybrid multiple-criteria decision analysis approach that effectively prioritized key internal strategic factors. The primary findings suggest that successful shipyards in the “business network” aspect outperform others in competitiveness. These findings hold fruitful implications for decision makers in medium-sized shipyards to prioritize the business network rather than profit margin, delivery time, quality assurance, and price level to sustain their business competitiveness. An insight of these findings is that to achieve strong business network, the source strategic factor should be process technology. Therefore, production technology should be considered the top priority when planning for long-term competitiveness of medium sized shipyards.