Abstract
Effectively implementing integrated design and manufacturing(IDM) has become a great challenge today as industries try to meet the ever-increasing market demands for low cost, high quality, and short lead-time. Traditionally, the integration between design and manufacturing decisions has been approached mainly as a technical problem of taskwork. However, because most IDM tasks are carried out by teams of engineers, the success of IDM also depends on the effectiveness of teamwork. In order to realize the full potential of IDM, both “taskwork” of individual engineers and “teamwork” of IDM teams must be addressed. This calls for a new socio-technical approach to understand how engineers can, and should, participate in joint decisions collaboratively in a highly dynamic team setting.
There are many different decision-making styles, ranging from a total dictatorship to completely democratic, where a group of stakeholders work together. In the past, studies in this field have been limited to the autocratic individual decisions due to the Arrow’s Possibility Theorem, which states that group decision-making is “inherently chaotic and can’t be consistent and rational.” Consequently, group decisions are often converted to multi-objective, multi-criteria optimization problems whose solutions are available from classical decision science. Such approaches take the collaborative and participative joint decision opportunities away from IDM teams, hence failing to reveal the true benefits and address the real challenges of integrated design and manufacturing. In this paper, we challenge this old myth of group decision-making and propose a new approach to support participative joint decisions in IDM teams. Rather than the traditional deterministic philosophy, our new socio-technical approach is based on a determinism paradigm. We carefully analyze the characteristics of IDM teams and the dynamic social interactions among team members. We present a set of alternative social science models and decision science techniques to support participative joint decisions as a collaborative negotiation process among IDM engineers. This paper opens a new possibility of collaborative engineering by using systemic approaches to support true participative teamwork in IDM teams, henceforth contributing to the ultimate goal of developing joint innovations and collective intelligence in integrated design and manufacturing.
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Lu, S.CY., Conger, A. (2007). Supporting Participative Joint Decisions in Integrated Design and Manufacturing Teams. In: Tichkiewitch, S., Tollenaere, M., Ray, P. (eds) Advances in Integrated Design and Manufacturing in Mechanical Engineering II. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6761-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6761-7_1
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