A meta decision support system approach to coordinating production/marketing decisions

This paper deals with the problem of coordinating production and marketing functions that are traditionally in conflict with each other. Our main concern is to develop a decision support system (DSS) for coordinating the two functions in a functionally decentralized firm where each function has information autonomy and makes its own decisions separately with respect to its own local objective function. Previous studies in literature fail to provide practically useful coordination frameworks. Based on coordination theory, this paper proposes a Meta DSS (MDSS) approach which can effectively solve the problem of coordinating production and marketing decisions. The MDSS framework we propose is capable of providing guidance for coordinating production and marketing decisions. An example is presented to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed MDSS approach. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.