A quantitative field study of the decision behaviour of four shop floor schedulers

In this article the decision behaviour of four production schedulers in a truck manufacturing company is investigated by means of a quantitative model. The model consists of there parts: performance variables, action variables and disturbance variables. The outcomes show that there is a large difference between schedulers that apparently have the same type of decision problem. Another interesting finding is that some scheduling actions work positively in the short term, but negatively over a longer term. Other results, along with methodological issues of quantitative research, are discussed.