Analysis of Integrating a Production Design Generator with a Business Decision Support System for System-Level Decision Making

Abstract

Decision support systems (DSSs) are used to enhance decision making speed and effectiveness. However, without a view of the entire system, any decision may have unanticipated effects, such as sub-optimal outcomes. This paper explores the benefits of applying a DSS over the analysis of unprocessed data and the effectiveness of integrating a product design generator (PDG) with a business DSS where system-level effects can be analyzed. Using survey questions and recording decision makers’ actions, it was found that decision makers are significantly faster and came to better conclusions when using the DSS over unprocessed data. However, it was also seen that the difference between the two variants of the system DSS that were used for testing was insignificant. Overall, this research shows that having a system-level tool is better than the unprocessed data and that large differences in a DSS are required for improvement between them.

Keywords

• decision support system
• product design generator
• system DSS
• multi-disciplinary decision making
• engineering systems