Decision making made by an individual from a variety of alternatives takes a lot of time, wasteful, and challenging. This paper looks at two approaches, the modified nominal group technique and analytical hierarchy process for determining criteria preference that will help criteria optimization in decision making. The result shows that there is slight difference in the two approaches in terms of criteria prioritization and this can also affects the selection process if adopted. However, the modified NGT tends to portray the true picture of the armature core design that was considered as the case study, choosing electrical resistivity as the most important property/criteria, while the AHP takes hardness as the most preferred criteria.