Score a Likert Scale Survey

[jac2010]

I have a Survey of 17 questions regarding specific companies. I need to create a score for each company. The questions are grouped into 3 areas, weighting of 40%, 40% and 30%, using the Likert scale of 5 responses for each question. Based on the score of each area, I came up with where each company fits into one of 9 categories like Experienced (doing well on 3 areas), Engaged and Enabled (doing well on 2 categories, 3 Emergent categories, doing well on one category etc.
How do I come up with an overall score. Looking at the total average doesn't match up to the categories (doing well on 2 categories, the company could have a higher total average score than other companies that do well on all 3 categories. Does anyone have any ideas on how to come up with one score for each company?
Thank you in advance!

 

[AhoyNC]

Maybe the attached link will be of some help. Here they are looking at the difference between Master and PhD students, but maybe you can look at that as company 1, 2 &3 in your case.

http://my.ilstu.edu/~eostewa/497/Likert topic-dane-likert.pdf

 

[jac2010]

Thank you, I've actually already read thru that. Not exactly what I'm looking for, but it gave me a couple ideas. I'll have to try them out to see if they actually work, but I thought there might be an easier way than what I'm thinking