The enhancement of traditional decision-making with a decision support system.
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Date
2013
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Abstract
Decision-making is a crucial part of management which is evident at all levels. Strategic decisions are taken by management and are vital to the functioning of the organization. It was important to gauge the current ability to make decisions and discover the shortfalls. Due to the amount of information, speed, and the immense amount of pressure to make good decisions, a new technological system to aid in this plight was found. This was in the form of a Decision Support System. This study investigated whether or not having a decision-making tool at the finger-tips of the managers would provide benefits, such as timely information, which could then be used for decision-making and could result in enhanced employee productivity at Toyota South Africa Assembly Hall Maintenance Department. It was not sufficient just to show the benefits of a new system. The system needed to be accepted first in order to obtain the maximum benefit of the system. The Technology Acceptance Model was used to find the relationships between the perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and the attitude of the users toward the use of the DSS. To obtain the information from the future senior management of the Department, questionnaires were issued of which 79% were returned answered. The information was examined and analysed with Pearson’s correlation, linear regression and literature comparisons, which found that perceived usefulness of the system plays a much greater role than the perceived ease of use in the acceptance of a system. To facilitate an improvement in the decision-making ability, it was recommended that a decision support system should be designed and installed as a long term investment. Further research needs to be undertaken to gain correct knowledge to originate a conceptual design and to bring this into operation. The design of the system was not evaluated and this proved to be a limitation to the study. However, to use the questionnaire to evaluate the design would have made the questionnaire more complicated and this would have been likely to have lowered the response rate, which would have jeopardized the study.
Description
MBA University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 2013.
Keywords
Decision support systems., Decision making -- Management., Theses -- Business administration.