Write a summery of the chapters APA Style

May 3rd, 2014

Chapter 9: Enabling the Organization – Decision Making

The chapter identifies analysis of large amount of information, swift decision making and application of sophisticate techniques of analysis as the challenges that face managers in their decision making capacity. The process of decision making is identified as having six steps; identification of the problem, data collection, generation, testing, selection then finally implementation of the solution. Such occur at every organizational level from operational, managerial and strategic. Operational decision making are identified as structured decisions, managerial ones as semi-structured decisions and strategic ones as unstructured decisions.

Management Intelligence Systems (MIS) are suggested as beneficial tools for managers. Managers should also use models so as to:

· Control the time to make decisions

· Manipulate the variables

· Comprehend uncertainty

· Calculate risks

The types of MIS are categorized according to organizational level where we have:

· Transaction Processing System -based at the operational level and help in making structured decisions. A type of transaction processing system can be an Online Transaction Processing System that uses technology to capture event information and transactions.

· Decision Support Systems – based at the managerial level and support business professionals and managers. It comprises of four quantitative models which are optimization analysis, goal-seeking analysis, sensitivity analysis and what-if analysis.

· Executive Information Systems – based at the strategic level and supports senior level executives. They offer the capabilities of slice-and-dice, drill-down and consolidation.

Artificial intelligence is considered the future of business applied technology as they simulate human intelligence. The most common categories of artificial intelligence are listed, such as: Expert systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms, intelligent agents and virtual reality.

Chapter 10: Extending the Organization – Supply Chain Management

The chapter commences by recognizing the fact that half or every dollar earned by companies is spent on production. Traditionally, focus on companies aiming to improve their supply chain will be on quality improvements to manufacturing. The supply chain is identified as having three main links:

· Flow of materials from suppliers and all other ‘upstream’ suppliers

· Materials are transformed via the organizations unique production process into semi finished and finished goods

· Goods are distributed to customers and all other ‘downstream’ consumers

Technologies that can manage supply chains effectively should thus be adopted by organizations. The basic of the supply chain in companies involve a process from planning, sourcing, making, delivering and then returning.

IT has a role in the supply chain that involves creation of tight process or integrations and information linkages between functions in a firm. A number of factors affect supply chain management and these are:

· Speed – this is fostered by need to please customers and the requirement for timely information in making strategic decisions

· Competition – Can be monitored and managed by Supply Chain Execution (SCE) and Supply Chain Planning (SCP) software.

· Consumer behavior – Monitored by Demand Planning software.

· Visibility – Ability to view all areas down and up the chain of supply. May encounter the bullwhip effect whereby passage of distorted information on product demand passes through out the chain of supply from one entity to the next.

Success factors of Supply Chain Management are:

· Being future oriented

· Deployment in incremental phases

· Ensuring the organizational goals are supported by the SCM in use

· Encourage employees to adopt new business practice

· Making sales to suppliers