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Decision Point One
- Frank Saia has worked at Hughes Aircraft for a long time. Now he is faced with the most difficult decisions of his career. He has been having problems in the environmental testing phase of his microchip manufacturing plant; the detailed nature of these tests has caused Hughes to be consistently late in delivering the chips to customers.
- Because of the time pressure to deliver chips, Saia has been working to make the production of chips more efficient without losing the quality of the product. Chips are manufactured and then tested, and this provides two places where the process can bottle up. Even though you might have a perfectly fine chip on the floor of the plant, it cannot be shipped without testing. And, since there are several thousand other chips waiting to be tested, it can sit in line for a long time. Saia has devised a method that allows testers to put the important chips, the "hot parts," ahead of the others without disrupting the flow and without losing the chips in the shuffle. He has also added a "gross leak" test that quickly tells if a chip in a sealed container is actually sealed or not. Adding this test early in the testing sequence allows environmental testing to avoid wasting time by quickly eliminating chips that would fail a more fine-grained leak test later in the sequence.
- Because environmental testing is still falling behind, Saia's supervisors and Hughes customers are getting angry and have begun to apply pressure. Karl Reismueller, the director of the Division of Microelectronics at Hughes, has given Saia's telephone number to several customers, whose own production lines were shut down awaiting the parts that Saia has had trouble delivering. His customers are now calling him directly to say "we're dying out here" for need of parts.
Dialogue for Decision Point One
- Construct a dialogue in which Saia responds to the pressure from his supervisor, Karl Reismueller
- Be sure to address the customer complaints
Debriefing Assignment for Decision Point One
- Each drama point revolves around one or more conflicts. What is the conflict in your drama point. How did you play this conflict out through your dramatization?
- Your drama takes place over a socio-technical system. Look at the above table. What are the key values at play in the Hughes STS? How did these values enter into your dramatization? For example, did a value conflict drive and confrontation between characters in your dramatization? Think, in this section, about how the STS and its values enter into your dramatic portrayal of the events in this case.
- What kind of narrative form did your drama take on? Was it a tragedy? A comedy? A story with a happy ending? Something else? What is it about the case that led you to pick the narrative form that you did?
- Finally, did you learn anything about the case by constructing and acting out your drama? What was it? What is different about these dramatic rehearsals in comparison with other learning activities you have undergone this semester?
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