Managers are faced with many decisions to make during the hour, day, week, month, and year. There are various decision-making techniques and approaches that a manager can use to process and administer these decisions must be made. Once managers have a good foundation where the problem stems, the manager can see about the speed in which to respond to the problem. Some problems can be fixed with quick action while managers may find other problems that need to be responded to by a more convoluted approach. Technique Utilized Mr. De Bonos (1999) Six Thinking Hats is an important and powerful technique.
It is used to look at decisions from a number of important perspectives. This forces you to move outside your habitual thinking style, and helps you to get a more rounded view of a situation. If you look at a problem with the ‘Six Thinking Hats’ technique, then you will solve it using all approaches. Your decisions and plans will mix ambition, skill in execution, public sensitivity, creativity and good contingency planning (1999). We would use this technique to get the results from all the different people that would be affected by using a virtual factory.
We would use this technique is to look at problems from the point of view of Technicians, engineers, floor supervisors and factory managers. This will tell us how it would affect each of these groups so we can address the issues without confrontation. How We Would Use This Technique We would have to use all six of the thinking hats together to get a sound and just decision. White Hat: With this thinking hat you focus on the data available (1999). Look at the information you have, and see what you can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge, and either try to fill them or take account of them.
This is where you analyze past trends, and try to extrapolate from historical data. Red Hat: Wearing the red hat, you look at problems using intuition, gut reaction, and emotion (1999). Also try to think how other people will react emotionally. Try to understand the responses of people who do not fully know your reasoning. Some floor managers wear this hat. Black Hat: Using black hat thinking, look at all the bad points of the decision (1999). Look at it cautiously and defensively. Try to see why it might not work. This is important because it highlights the weak points in a plan.
It allows you to eliminate them, alter them, or prepare contingency plans to counter them. Black Hat thinking is one of the real benefits of this technique, as many successful people get so used to thinking positively that often they cannot see problems in advance. Process engineers would wear this hat as they are always in it for the negative to try and fix it avoiding the positive. The rest of these hats would be shared between the Technicians and the factory managers. Yellow Hat: The yellow hat helps you to think positively (1999). It is the optimistic viewpoint that helps you to see all the benefits of the decision and the value in it.
Yellow Hat thinking helps you to keep going when everything looks gloomy and difficult. Green Hat: The Green Hat stands for creativity (1999). This is where you can develop creative solutions to a problem. It is a freewheeling way of thinking, in which there is little criticism of ideas. Blue Hat: The Blue Hat stands for process control (1999). This is the hat worn by people chairing meetings. When running into difficulties because ideas are running dry, they may direct activity into Green Hat thinking. When contingency plans are needed, they will ask for Black. Evaluation Tools and Methods Used
There are several methods that could be utilized in evaluating decision-making; observational, database, and subjective. According to Kirvesoja (2001), when using the observational method, some degree of formal objective measurement is involved; the basic idea is to reach out to reality as directly as possible. The database method is just as it states, the use of historical domains where records of an endless amount of information is stored. This also contains collected and disseminated information from others that are available in books, journals, periodicals, and various reports.
The problem with data collection is that there is so much information available on so many topics that much of the most important information is either not collected or lost during the process of data collection. The third method is subjective; this is the actual drawing of conclusions from or data from the psychological contents of peoples minds, by using such tools as questionnaires or interviews. We utilized each of the available methods with in our technique Six Thinking hats. We collected data from various individuals and other sources.
We also observed the information we gathered to see what we could learn from it. Getting questionnaire and interviews completed, could give you a better idea of the techniques are directly affecting individuals, thus decreasing the need for direct confrontation. Resources needed to complete the assignment. When Intel (2000) began implementing the “Copy Exactly” strategy, it saw rapid productivity and financial gains. As the strategy evolved, manufacturing became the heart of Intel’s turnaround and growth in the 1990s. Productivity increased many times over.
Managers from high-volume facilities participate at the development plant as a new process technology is created. Only equipment and process output parameters were copied exactly to the high-volume plant. Everything at the development plant – the process flow, equipment set, suppliers, plumbing, manufacturing clean room, and training methodologies – is selected to meet high volume needs, recorded, and then copied exactly to the high-volume plant (2000). By creating a global virtual fab network, Intel limits impact from natural or man-made disasters.
If an event occurs in one part of the world, Intel manufacturing does not come to a halt. The rest of the fab network is able to continue production and continue shipping product to customers. Intel has greater resources than other companies’ fabs because each Intel fab can share technical resources worldwide across the virtual factory network. By continuously sharing information, the virtual factory engineering organization can instantaneously implement process adjustments globally; thereby improving product performance and reducing costs in all Intel factories.
