Defective Still Deflective – How Correctness of Decision Support Systems Influences User’s Performance in Production Environments

The increasing dynamic and complexity of todays global supply chains and the growing amount and complexity of information challenge decision makers in manufacturing companies. Decision Support Systems (DSS) can be a viable solution to address these challenges and increase the overall decision efficiency and effectivity. However, a thought-through design and implementation of these systems is crucial for their efficacy. This article presents the current state-of-the-art of Decisions Support Systems and highlights their benefits and pitfalls. Also, we present an empirical study in which we compared different levels of decision support and decision automation in a simulated supply chain game environment. We identify and quantify how human factors influence the decision quality and decision performance in this supply chain scenario. We show that an adequately designed system raises the overall performance. However, insufficiently designed systems have the reverse effect and lead operators to miss severe situations, which can have fatal consequences for manufacturing companies.