Strategic Contributions of Mining Suppliers Within a Regional Mining Ecosystem: An AHP Decision Framework for Structural Analysis and Sensitivity Assessment

The increasing reliance of the mining industry on specialized suppliers has highlighted the need to understand which capabilities suppliers consider most important for strengthening their participation within regional mining supplier ecosystems. However, existing research has focused primarily on supplier selection and evaluation from the perspective of mining companies, providing limited evidence on how suppliers themselves prioritize their strategic contributions. This study examines these contributions in the Coquimbo Region (Chile) using a multicriteria decision framework based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), complemented by performance, gradient, and head-to-head sensitivity analyses. The results identify Sustainability (0.239) and Management (0.212) as the highest-priority criteria, while Safety Management (0.069), Financial Management (0.059), Human Resource Management (0.054), and Data Management (0.054) emerge as the highest-ranked strategic contributions. Sensitivity analysis further demonstrates that the influence of a criterion depends not only on its global weight but also on its position within the hierarchical decision structure, allowing the identification of stable and context-sensitive priorities under alternative weighting scenarios. These findings show that integrating AHP with sensitivity analysis provides a robust decision framework for interpreting strategic priorities and supporting supplier development within regional mining ecosystems.