Manufacturing project management in the conglomerate enterprises supported by IDSS

Purpose: of this paper is to summarize the application study of a general framework of intelligent decision support system (IDSS) to collaborative projects in conglomerate enterprises. In some situations, even with the knowledge of how to find right information and which decision making methods to apply, we do not have enough time to make right decisions at the right time. In this paper, the framework of an IDSS system to support real-time collaboration and enable seamless data exchange is presented. Design/methodology/approach: The important roles of facilitation and organization that the IDSS plays are demonstrated. In the case study, examples of manufacturing projects analysis are given with the known methods, including Analytical Hierarchy Process and Bayes’ rule. Findings: It is demonstrated that IDSS systems can help us to manage information flow, clean data, transform data into knowledge, perform analysis and monitor the effectiveness of manufacturing projects during the whole life cycle. Research limitations/implications: The functionality of the developed framework is limited by the willingness of management style and culture changes in companies, as well as the level of interoperability between commercial software components. Only the essential components that influence the success of the manufacturing projects are considered. Practical implications: Project engineers and managers need to adapt to the new IT-based working environment. Originality/value: New information management model and the framework of IDSS system are proposed. The new collaborative decision making system consists of different parts: management of information flow, preparation of data for decision making, and actual decision making and monitoring of manufacturing projects supported by several methods.