The production strategy can be planned in a number of ways and the organization wants to select the best course of action. The decision making process involves proper analysis of these alternatives and then to select the most suitable alternative .The decision making is an art of taking rational decisions using various scientific and analytical techniques. Here a rational decision for any organization is one with which the management can achieve its goals with minimum efforts of time and money. The management should be able to evaluate the risks associated with each alternative and the one with minimum risk should be preferred. In the opinion of Herbert Simon decision making and management appears to synonymous terms. Decision making approach in production management mainly consists of following steps:
• Comprehension: A step unified awareness is derived from sensory processes about the phenomenon under consideration
• Conception: It is the scheme of design of formulating ideas or concepts about the phenomenon generated from comprehension.
• Investigation: The idea or concepts from conception provides many alternative choices. The procedure of collected information about the possible outcomes from these alternatives and then to compare their merits and demerits is known as investigation
• Deliberation: This implies the mental weighing and assessment of merits and consequences of various schemes.
• Selection: Investigation and deliberation provides the guidelines to select the best alternative for the given situation keeping in view the overall interest of the organization.
• Implementation: This is the final stage of decision making process. The information about the alternative selected is communicated to the concerned people for using it to get the desired solution.
In recent years a production manager is generally involved in making decisions under unpredictable and uncertain situation. There are many considerations or factors associated with the final choice and the decision maker must be fully acquainted with these factors.
The decision making process can be divided into two categories:
• Based on judgment and intuition.
• Based on some quantitative methods.
