Exam 7: Manufacturing and Service Technologies

Discuss the six questions employees are normally asked to show how departmental technology can be analyzed for determining its placement on Perrow's technology framework.

Engineering technologies tend to be low in analyzability and high in variety.

The goal of the sociotechnical systems approach is to design the organization for pooled interdependence.

The management systems in both unit-production and continuous-process technology are characterized as

Woodward's scale of technical complexity originally had 15 categories.

Sequential interdependence exists when the output of operation A is the input of operation B, and the output of operation B is the input back again to operation A.

List and briefly describe the subcomponents of the digital factory.

The production of tangible outputs from service technology, rather than intangible ones from manufacturing technology, is the most obvious difference between the two technologies.

The frequency of unexpected and novel events that occur in the conversion process refers to:

An integrated information network refers to a computerized system with a common database linking all areas of the organization such as accounting, inventory control, design, marketing, production, etc.

Hermes International produces a Kelly handbag, named for the late actress Grace Kelly. Craftsmen stitch the majority of each $7,000 bag by hand and sign it when they finish. This is an example of _____ production.

Span of control is the number of employees who report to a single manager or supervisor and is normally influenced by departmental technology.

Juan works for a college that offers correspondence courses. She works in the mailroom department stuffing envelopes with the replies of professors to students. She then seals the envelopes and puts them in an outgoing bin. She finds that on this job she has a lot of time for daydreaming. You would expect the organizational structure in her department should be:

The management systems in both unit production and continuous process are characterized as mechanistic, whereas mass production is seen as organic.

Using the sociotechnical systems model, explain the design for joint optimization both in terms of the model and in terms that describe the meaning.

Perrow's study is classified as pertaining to organization-level technology, while Woodward's is classified as pertaining to department-level technology.

Job enrichment refers to the expansion of the number of different tasks performed by an employee.

"Technology" could be considered to be the tools, techniques, and actions that are used to transform organizational inputs into outputs.

____ includes the assignment of goals and tasks to be accomplished by employees.

____ is defined as designing the social and technical systems to fit the needs of one another.