Article ID: | iaor20081689 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 16 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 77 |
End Page Number: | 92 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2007 |
Journal: | Production and Operations Management |
Authors: | Hopp Wallace J., Iravani Seyed M.R., Shou Biying |
Improving performance of production systems is a critical but often unstructured activity. To help managers convert ad hoc or trial&error improvement efforts into efficient and systematic reviews, we develop a diagnostic tree which decomposes a performance improvement objective into successively more concrete sub-objectives and finally into potential improvement strategies. Based on principles from the Operations Management literature, this tree is structured to enable a non-specialist to better understand the links between corrective actions and performance. It also provides an important foundation for a principles-based knowledge management system that couples the decision tree with a search engine for locating relevant documents within an intranet.