VT Decision Engineering

Decision-Making Begets Decision Engineering

     Making decisions is an integral part of any organization, and some even consider it to be the most important function of management. Everything that makes a business run — planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and more — hinges on how well a decision has been made, the timeliness of the decision, and the consequences of the decision.

     The role that decisions occupy in business is critical, which is why the past few years have seen the rise in the need for Vit Tall LLC's Decision Engineering software and services, which aim to identify, create, and implement systems and processes that can help organizations make better decisions.

What is Decision Engineering?

     Vit Tall LLC's Decision Engineering software and services are particularly crucial amidst a hyper-connected and fast-paced 21st century environs. Accordingly, Vit Tall LLC has invested substantial resources into developing tools and techniques for better informing operational and business decision-making within industries by utilizing available data and information and the organization's inherent knowledge. Vit Tall LLC's Decision Engineering software and services apply available knowledge to develop, build, maintain, and improve the decision-making systems currently in place. Vit Tall LLC's Decision Engineering software and services will help an organization analyze and understand a particular situation in order to arrive at the best course of action possible; the analysis component is referred to as Diagnosis Analytics.

     Vit Tall LLC Decision Engineers are chiefly responsible for designing and developing ways to improve a specific system to make it more efficient and effective for a business. Typically, this is operationalized, via a four-step process that goes from Decision Theory to System Analysis, to Probability Theory, and finally, to Information Science. Decision Theory, in the simplest of terms, is the study of an organization’s choices. Vit Tall LLC Decision Engineers use the Decision Pathway Analysis framework to break down the decision-making process, which allows them to identify factors and circumstances that influence an organization’s choices. Once this has been ascertained, Vit Tall LLC Decision Engineers move on to conduct a System Analysis, wherein facts are collected and interpreted, and the components of a particular problem are further broken down to make it more comprehensible; often a Deterministic Model is utilized to achieve this, which, according to practitioners, is a mathematical model that can precisely determine outcomes through known or observed relationships among states and events, leaving no room for random variations. Vit Tall LLC Decision Engineers then start on performing a Probability Assessment, which involves evaluating uncertainties and unknown variables to identify what situations are likely to happen. Finally, the information that the assigned Vit Tall LLC Decision Engineers have managed to gather is recorded and stored in such a way that it can be interpreted and implemented easily. This four-step process may seem trite, but it requires the Vit Tall LLC Decision Engineers to consider a myriad of potentialities; they also need to consider the actions currently being undertaken and those actions, which should be undertaken.

Why is Decision Engineering Important?

     To comprehend just how crucial a role Decision Engineering plays, we examine a case study of successful Decision Engineering. During the post-World War II period, the Japanese automobile industry encountered stiff competition from American car manufacturers, such as Ford and General Motors. Taiichi Ohno, one of the lead engineers at Toyota, realized that the company’s approach to manufacturing needed to change so as to effectuate transformational change to become more competitive; at the time, Toyota was expending a tremendous amount of resources to deal with the huge amount of heavy equipment and machinery that came into their facilities. These all had to be organized and stored, and they were warehoused until needed by the production team. Ohno took examined this relatively inefficient system and decided that there had to be a better way.

Ohno proposed a just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing approach, which involved the company receiving their supplies only when they were ready to be used. This meant that Toyota no longer had to store thousands of car parts and tie up cash flow in inventory, thereby leaving them flush to explore other opportunities to diversify their product offerings. Ohno’s recommendations didn’t just help Toyota rise to the top; it also revived the Japanese automobile industry. Ohno later became one of the company’s top executives and today, Toyota has a net worth of approximately US$236 billion. However, their inefficient manufacturing process wasn’t the only thing that proved to be challenging to Toyota.

     On February 1, 1977, a fire broke out at an Aisin Seiki plant, one of Toyota’s most trusted suppliers and was the sole provider of their P-valves, a crucial brake component used in every Toyota vehicle. Given their implemented JIT production scheme, Toyota only had two or three days’ worth of P-valve stock on hand, and the fire threatened to impact their operations for weeks due to this single point of failure.

For many industry observers, Toyota’s shut-down seemed inevitable. Instead, Toyota bounced back and managed to get hundreds of firms to set up alternative production sites outside of Aisin Seiki. In just a few short days, organizations that had little to no experience with manufacturing P-valves were producing and delivering them to Toyota, and the Toyota's assembly plants were reopened after a mere two-day shut-down. In the end, over two hundred firms participated in this collaborative effort, with no haggling or negotiations over proprietary rights and financial compensation. These achievements were a product of a small and simple change, brought about by a Decision Engineering action and an ensuing Resiliency Engineering paradigm. Vit Tall LLC's Decision Engineering software and services can have a profound impact and benefit businesses and organizations by identifying potential Single Points of Failure, optimizing Decision Engineering pathways, and operationalizing a Resiliency Engineering paradigm.

Diagnostic Analytics facilitates Decision Engineering

     In a global evolving economy, many companies find it difficult to keep up.

     From technological developments to new marketing techniques, our world demands that businesses are always at the top of their game, performing to the highest degree, and offering products and services that go beyond the needs of the customer.

     Many businesses have failed in their effort to do just that. However, with the help of Vit Tall LLC's Decision Engineering software and services, many have excelled, rising to the challenge, and delivering exactly what our world wants to see from them. Vit Tall LLC clients have adjusted their operations to take into consideration the practicalities of reality, and they have adjusted their offerings to better fit the market demand. Most importantly, they have become more flexible, able to quickly respond to issues, and able to resolve them at a moment’s notice. What do these companies have in common? For one thing, with the help of Vit Tall LLC's Decision Engineering software and services, they have a robust Diagnostic Analytics strategy in place.

What is Diagnostic Analytics?

     

     As Vit Tall LLC Decision Engineers like to explain, Diagnostic Analytics is a form of advanced analytics that examines data or content to answer the question, "‘"why did it happen?” In essence, Diagnostic Analytics endeavors to answer the question, “Why.” Why did this happen? Why did this specific data turn out that way? Why did we get these kinds of results? Ideally, these can be answered through a comprehensive Diagnostic Analytics process.

     The functions of Diagnostic Analytics can be boiled down into three specific categories: Identify Anomalies, Discovery, and Determine Causal Relationships. First and foremost, Identify Anomalies means to establish areas or factors that require further study because they raise questions that can’t be answered by the available data. For instance, the Diagnostic Analytics team of a small retail company could put forward anomaly identification questions, such as why sales increased in New York when the marketing strategy didn’t change at all or why traffic to a digital storefront suddenly dropped without explanation.

     On the other hand, Discovery involves identifying data sources that would help explain the anomalies that had been previously established. Oftentimes, analysts are required to look beyond the existing data sets, determining patterns and points that would allow them to discern evidence-based causal correlations.

     Lastly, Determining Causal Relationships requires analyzing events and causes that might have resulted from the identified anomalies. For the example of a small retail company, analysts may have uncovered that a huge conference had taken place in New York that week, which was many people suddenly purchased clothes from the retail location. They could have also discovered that a competitor had recently launched their own e-commerce site, which could explain the sudden drop in web traffic for the digital storefront.

     These root causes may seem quite insignificant; however, their impact on a business can be massive. Countless organizations have failed because they were unable to identify the root causes of the issues that they ran into, which meant that they could not immediately rectify them. Vit Tall LLC Decision Engineers can help identify root causes.

Why is Diagnostic Analytics Important?

     

     Business owners undoubtedly desire that their organizations to be sustainable. They want their companies to be their legacies. This may have been readily achievable in times past, but unfortunately, today's environment demands a higher level of effort. Business owners need to leverage all the experience they have at hand to make decisions; decision paralysis is not emblematic of a robust diagnostic analytics and decision engineering process.

     Vit Tall LLC's Decision Engineering software and services can help organizations avoid decision paralysis, implement a robust decision engineering process, operationalize a resiliency paradigm, and create new opportunities. Vit Tall LLC - Decision Engineering for Better World.