如何进行业务决策 Making Business Decisions

决策是是每个人都参与一个过程。一个人可以非常简单的做出决定,比如是否购买iphone或如何为他的工厂选择一个位置。在这样的决策过程中,我们经常要向他人寻求信息,或其他各种支持。有时候一个人没有完成决策过程。相反,他会配合别人做决定,被称为集团决策。

我们都知道,一个有效的团体决策的成功对于的一个项目或者一个企业至关重要。在这篇文章中我们将集中在群体决策来选择Waverun的新工厂位置。

Decision making is a process that everybody is involved in everyday. People all make decisions, from very simple one of whether to buy iphone or Samsung to complex one as to how to select a location for his factory. During such decision making process, we often have to turn to others for information, or other various kinds of support. Sometimes, one can not finish the decision making process only by himself. Rather, he would cooperate with others to make a decision, which is called group decision making.

As we all know, an effective group decision making is of vital importance to the success of a project or an enterprise. In this essay, we are going to concentrate on the group decision making on the selection of a location for the Waverun’s new factory.

Group decision-making topic and process
This essay is set in the context that the Waverun is considering to select a new factory. The Waverun is an auto parts factory which is located in Shanghai now. However, regardless of several years of experience in auto parts manufacturing, the recent financial statements of the Waverun has shown a negative result.

Therefore, as staff from all levels in the Waverun, we are working as a team to select a location for Waverun’s factory.
Before our group has decided to move to a new factory, we have three different places for selection: Shaoxing, Zhenjiang, and Fujian. At first, we were divided into two groups, one responsible for looking for the advantages of these three places, and the other for the disadvantages of these places. However, when we finished, problems arose in that Zhenjiang has apparent disadvantages in auto parts manufacturing, but enjoys the most advantageous condition for labor resources, whereas Shaoxing is a less developed city with more auto parts factories centring there. Therefore, it is not easy for us to get an overall evaluation on these cities and thus making the right decision.

As a result, we gave up that decision making tool and started to consider whether we had other better choices. After a deep thinking, we decided that we should adopt the multi-criteria analysis. By comprehensively evaluating these three cities using the multi-criteria analysis, we worked as a group to collect abundant data and information on the economic developing levels, employment rates, labor resources and quality, social customs, and even industry regulations of these three places. After the evaluation, we finally decided on Shaoxing as the new location of the Waverun’s factory.

Choice and application of decision-making tool
A strategic decision is often made by the leaders or representatives in a company, which is very important as it is directly related to the future performance of the company. The decision making process is also of vital importance since it is a process of creating, evaluating and implementing the decisions.

Multi-criteria analysis has been a very useful tool in decision making. Judging from the decision analytical perspective, uncertainty and complexity have been two of the most troublesome challenges (Zopounidis  & Pardalos, 2010).

On the one hand, before the Waverun is to locate its new factory, it has to make an evaluation of whether it will succeed or not. This is one kind of uncertainty which is called epistemic, and means that the Waverun may lack an overall knowledge of the impacts of the external environments on its performance. However, multi-criteria analysis is just one on the some of the external factors that will impact the future performance of the decision.

On the other hand, the decision complexity is another reason why our group adopted the multi-criteria analysis. In our group decision making process, the major complexity came from the inter-relationship among the three choices. For example, all of them are small and medium-sized businesses, and they all have comparatively abundant labour resources. However, by adopting the multi-criteria analysis, we have explored the interrelationship among them and found out the features that distinguished them from each other.

Therefore, it is of great use to adopt the multi-criteria analysis in the group decision making process. Not only does it helps deal with the uncertainties in the decision making process, but also it helps find a way to tackle the decision complexity.

Decision making traps
Everyday, people are making decisions. Some succeed; while some fail. The problems lie in that there are some blunders and traps that would puzzle the decision makers. The failure rate will reduce greatly if those blunders and traps are skillfully avoided (Paul, 2009).
For example, when making a big and important decision, such as to select a location for a factory, the traps of limited research and no innovation often take place.

In the Waverun’s case, although we have divided our group into three small ones, with two responsible for collecting information and the other one responsible for putting forward innovative ideas, the follow-up researches showed that the results are not that satisfying. Since group members are assigned different tasks, they can not cooperate with each other very well. Therefore, the data and information was very full, and we did not realize the real innovation through multi-criteria analysis.

Conclusion
The decision making process is of vital importance to the success of a project or an enterprise. In this essay, we demonstrate our decision making process for the Waverun to select a new location for its factory. Though the process or stages of the decision making are almost the same as others, we adopt the multi-criteria analysis to carry out our research and finally decide on the location. What’s more, during the decision making process, we also take into consideration the decision making traps. As it is a very complex case to select a new location for the Waverun’s factory, the limitation of information and even no innovation have posed a trap for the decision making process. But anyway, we have overcome that difficulty and we believe that we have made the right decision
 
Reference Listhttp://www.ukthesis.org/ygsslwdx/
C.Zopounidis, PM Pardalos.M. (2010).Handbook of Multicriteria Analysis. 25-30
Denis.B & Didier.D, Henri.P. M. (2010). Decision Making Process: Concepts and Methods. Wiley-ISTE
Paul.C.N.M. (2009). Why Decisions Fail: Avoiding the Blunders and Traps That Lead to Debacles. Books.google.com