Week 6-7 ROL

During week six and seven lectures, I have observed more insight towards manufacturing in New
Zealand and the decision making the process for my projects.

Manufacturing makes up 12% of the New Zealand economic. With the development of additive
manufacturing as our team is studying, more products can be manufactured locally which benefits our
economy. In New Zealand, products such as toys, spare parts are rarely manufactured and commonly
imported from overseas. Following the current trend of the development of additive manufacturing, we
have predicted that additive manufacturing can satisfy the middle to high-end production of toys and
spare parts locally at a relatively low price shortly. Even though it might not be possible to compete with
mass production manufacturing, this will benefit our economy as it might bring potential jobs to the
locals and transportation fees will be less as the import will mostly be raw materials which takes less
space in the containers. While more manufacturing can be done locally, this growth in economics can
be like "distance" in history, be an essential market force that drives the development of manufacturing
in New Zealand in a more innovative perspective.

Also, I have learnt a vital decision-making process that will benefit myself in both my university projects
and my future career. It is always much easier to decide when there is only a single criteria decision
problem. However, that is generally not the case. Multi-Criteria Decision Problem is more commonly
seen in real life as there are always other criteria that we should also take into consideration. Especially
when the criteria are competing with one another, that is why I believe what I have observed from the
lectures about MCDM analysis is very helpful as a systematic decision-making process will not only
speed up the decision-making process but also help myself with making better decisions. This analysis
provides justification for decisions and improves chances of acceptance of result. As Jan was talking
about that we should define a clear objective for the project first. At the beginning of our project, since
the whole team did not clearly state the objectives, we were wondering in all different directions in our
project. When we spoke to our client, he would prefer us to think outside the box and be creative on
what may happen in the future, and what will be the change due to the development of additive
manufacturing. However, this is a vast scope for the team as the future can mean the next five years,
ten years, 30 years and even 100 years later. While the number goes up, more changes around the
rapidly evolving world are beyond our imagination, and our prediction will be less reliable. Also, the
development of additive manufacturing in different categories of products would have been different
due to different market forces behind them. Luckily the tutors spotted this problem and pointed to us.
During our recent meeting with our client, we clarify and narrowed our project objectives to be
estimating the volumetric change on the major categories of products due to the potential disruption by
the development of additive manufacturing. With clear objectives, we can then approach this project
more efficiently. Also, as per the lecture was talking about, it is crucial to balance multiple stakeholders
value and judgements as different decision makers have different preferences. We had created a few
stakeholder matrices before AHP was taught, the stakeholder matrix can then help us with rating the
criteria in our project while decisions need to be made. We should evaluate the criteria that the most
critical stakeholder concern about with a higher score than those listed by less important stakeholders
and build our decision based on that.