A system for group production planning in manufacturing

Group decision support systems (GDSSs) are responding to the growing importance of groups, lateral coordination, and the integration of activities inside modern businesses. The development of GDSSs has gone through three phases, each showing distinctive research themes and application fields, ranging from decision rooms to distributed systems. The authors developed a GDSS prototype (GROUPS), based on an empirical study of an IBM plant in Italy, to foster group cooperation in obtaining production efficiency and effectiveness. The GROUPS project incorporates particular software modules specifically designed to support the interactions and communications of a group of production managers.