Decision support systems (DSS) design for operations managers: an empirical study of the impact of report design and decision style on effective choice
通过模拟实验，研究了生产管理者的决策风格与报告设计（表格/图形、原始/汇总数据）如何影响生产调度决策的时间、信心和成本，发现某些报告设计更适合特定决策风格。
Abstract In making decisions, production managers usually rely on information contained in reports generated by an information system. Unfortunately, a production manager is likely to receive a report that best supports his/her decision‐making style only by chance. This investigation studies the individual differences in decision‐making style for production managers making production scheduling decisions, and the decision support design that best supports their decisions. Ninety‐six subjects classified by decision‐making style (Myers‐Briggs Classification) acted as production managers in a simulated production environment. Sequential production scheduling decisions were made based on reports generated by a computerized production simulator. The simulator was an interactive program that simulates a production task in a single‐product organization. Based upon the information contained in the reports, managers developed production schedules for the firm's next production run and input their decisions into the simulator, which then generated the reports for that run. The managers' objective was to minimize the firm's total cost. Decision‐making style and the type of report were examined as independent variables in the study. The dependent variables were decision time, decision confidence, and total cost of production. Thus, a manager's performance was measured by decision time, confidence, and the manager's total cost. Each manager was classified by decision‐making style and received as output one of four report designs, i.e., tabular‐raw data, tabular‐summarized data, graphical‐raw data, or graphical‐summarized data. The results of the experiment suggest that for production decision support systems there are report designs better suited to certain decision‐making styles than others for scheduling decisions. However, the results indicate that managers with certain decision‐making styles can make effective scheduling decisions with more than one type of report design. The implications of the results are illustrated by means of example MRP reports.