Browsing by Author "Ramsunder, Suven Mohanlal."

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The enhancement of traditional decision-making with a decision support system.
(2013) Ramsunder, Suven Mohanlal.; Munapo, Elias.
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.
Understanding the causes for a low success rate of technology- prompted change: a case study of Toyota South Africa.
(2016) Ramsunder, Suven Mohanlal.; Zondi, Wellington Bonginkosi.
Technological advancements are inevitable if a business wants to remain competitive, however, in addition to the multiple benefits there are also numerous difficulties associated with the implementation of new technology and automation. This study delves into the perspective of the semi to low-skilled workers, with the viewpoints of management being investigated to draw a comparison. The research was carried out at Toyota South Africa Manufacturing in Durban, with the respondents comprising of 315 semi to low-skilled workers, and six managers. The semi to low-skilled workers were issued questionnaires, while the managers were interviewed, hence a mixed methodology was used. The literature review provides the basis of the study, which outlines the factors affecting resistance to change. Firstly, the acceptance of technology was assessed to ensure that the respondents were indeed receptive to new technology. Once this was established, the next step was to look at the factors affecting the resistance to change, such as, fear, trust, job wellbeing and self-acceptance. The status quo bias was adopted to bring these factors together to show that, even though the respondents were open to using new technology, if it was not administered correctly the initiatives would fail. The study not only developed a framework that could be incorporated when applying new technology, it also found certain improvements that could be incorporated. Amongst other recommendations, this study put forth the notion that the semi to lowskilled workers should be incorporated into the change process from the inception of the technological advancement processes, with diverse forms of communication being used so as to ensure that the different groups that exist within the company would have a proper understanding of the processes. It also highlighted the perceptions that management had of the employees and the actual insight of the workers. The study concludes with limitations of the study and future research that could be done to enhance the findings.