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A group of Faculty members of the School of Industrial Management at Purdue University have for some time been engaged in studies of decision making in a large, decentralized American manufacturing company. These studies have investigated decisions at the mills producing raw material and the converting plants of this fully integrated company. Examinations have been made of decision processes within and between company plants with the objective of adding to theory of behavior in organizations, particularly theory of working relations and theory of cognitive processes in the carrying out of complex organizational tasks, and application of theory to the solution of practical problems, such as those of scheduling production and of formal organization.
This paper discusses one of these projects, an attempt to construct a behavioral model of the decision rules actually employed to schedule orders for production in one of the firm's plants. This project has sought to embody decision rules in a computer program which will, in fact, take incoming data on orders and plant capacity and convert this into an operating schedule in a manner highly analogous to that of the human schedulers who performed this task.[] The following discussion avoids technical details, since the aim of this paper is to give an overall picture of the major purpose and problems of this type of research; to describe its origin and to suggest possible future application as seen by the researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the changes in the concentration of manufacturing in the United States. Industrialization of a nation; Importance of manufacturing as a livelihood; Interest in decentralization; Distribution of facilities; Effect of the war; Freight rates.