Collaborative decision-making and decision support systems for enhancing operations management in industrial environments

Creativity in decision-making is increasingly focusing on providing solutions that consider how different approaches and different ideas work productively together. This is particularly evident in the operations management field. In order to support such a decisionmaking revolution, the nature of inter-organisational collaboration is changing and requires a higher degree of tactical and strategic co-ordination as well as the design and implementation of new decision-support tools and information sharing schemas with network partners. Therefore, the study of collaborative decision-making trends and solutions and their contribution to improved operations and business performance is presented as a theme of contemporary interest and for both practitioners and academics. It is a pleasure for the EURO Working Group on Decision Support Systems (EWG-DSS) to introduce this special issue of the Production Planning & Control Journal on ‘Collaborative Decision-Making and Decision Support Systems for enhancing Operations Management in Industrial Environments’. This special issue has focused on bringing together a range of papers that address and implement collaborative solutions for supporting the design of production systems. The papers finally accepted and published in this special issue have been the subject to a rigorous peer review process, based on initial editor screening and anonymous refereeing by four independent highly qualified expert referees. Hence, we would like to thank all the authors and reviewers for their efforts and for their valuable feedback within this process. Six papers from a total of 26 submissions have finally made it through the two-stage review process. Each of these papers has not only employed a thorough methodological approach but has also attempted to address real industry problems, solutions and challenges. The final set of papers provides a knowledge confluence for research into decision support systems, collaborative solutions and operations management in a variety of industrial environments. Firstly, we were very pleased to receive the manuscript ‘A knowledge chain management framework to support integrated decisions in global supply chains’ from Shaofeng Liu, Jonathan Moizer, Phil Megicks, Dulekha Kasturiratne and Uchitha Jayawickrama. The authors have proposed a global knowledge chain management framework that identifies and prioritises critical knowledge that global supply chain environments can consider for supporting their integrated decisions. From their results of their study, manufacturing industries can understand and visualise better how to support integrated decisions under a global supply chain perspective. Also from a global decision-making perspective, the next contribution is made by Andrés Boza, M.M.E. Alemany, F. Alarcón, Llanos Cuenca entitled ‘A modeldriven DSS architecture for delivery management in collaborative supply chains with lack of homogeneity in products’. In this paper, a model-driven decision support system has been conceived to support the process of re-allocating available inventory in collaborative supply chains. The main implications of using and implementing the developed collaborative solution are demonstrated in an application in the ceramics industry. The third contribution ‘Supporting the collaborative decision-making process in an automotive supply chain with a multi-agent system’ is by Jorge E. Hernández, Andrew C. Lyons, Josefa Mula, Raul Poler and Hossam Ismail. Linked to the novel combination of collaboration, supply chain design, operations management and decision support systems, this paper presents a generic collaborative solution implemented in the automotive industry, which supports multi-level decision-making processes in multi-level supply chain environments from a tactical point of view within a negotiation process. Based on a multi-agent system implementation, it demonstrates that profit and service level for every supply chain node, and the supply chain as a whole, can be improved by re-engineering the supply chain to support a collaborative decision-making design. In line with the previous papers, the fourth contribution, from Julien Maheut, Juan Manuel Besga, Jone Uribetxeberria and Jose P. Garcia-Sabater, deals with the operational perspective of the collaborative decisionmaking process in supply chain networks and is entitled ‘A Decision Support System for modeling and implementing the Supply Network Configuration and Operations Scheduling problem in the machine tool industry’. The key thrust of this paper concerns a simulation-based decision support system to simultaneously solve a supply network configuration problem and operations scheduling problem for the machine tool industry. Moreover, by Production Planning & Control, 2014 Vol. 25, No. 8, 636–638, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09537287.2013.798083