A Multicriteria Structured Model to Assist the Course Offering Assertiveness Rodrigues Forte de Lima Silva Junior1, Plácido Rogério Pinheiro2 Graduate Program in Applied Informatics University of Fortaleza, Fortaleza, Brazil 1 National
Commercial Apprenticeship Services - NCAS/CE, Fortaleza, Brazil
[email protected] 2 University
of Fortaleza, Fortaleza, Brazil
[email protected]
Abstract. Decision-making processes within companies are increasingly complex. This is due to the fact that the amount of data available and the various variables that should be considered in the decision-making process. In the field of professional education, it is no different, the decision to choose which course should be offered becomes an activity of high complexity because of the various criteria that must be considered for the assertiveness of the offer, such as profitability, client profile, macroeconomic characteristics, program content, characteristics of the locality of the course, among others. Once the scenario is presented, the objective of this work is to propose a model of selection and prioritization of variables for the choice of courses offered in the professional education institution National Commercial Apprenticeship Services through the Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis. We present the context of the decision of the problem and, applying the cognitive mapping, we identify the most relevant criteria to detect which characteristics that most impact in the decision making.
Keywords: Assistance in decision making; Multicriteria decision analysis; Assertiveness of the Course Offering; Modeling of the criteria; Cognitive Mapping.
1
INTRODUCTION The National Commercial Apprenticeship Services - NCAS was created on January 10, 1946, by the National Confederation of Commerce of Goods, Services, and Tourism (CNC), through Decree-Law 8,621. From the following year, NCAS began to develop a work that had been innovative in the country until then: to offer, on a large scale, professional education for the training and preparation of workers for trade, acting without any imputation to the public safes or to the taxpayers, since all the expenses would be exclusive to the account of the commercial entrepreneurs, calculated on the wage sheets of its employees. The National Commercial Apprenticeship Services - NCAS has regional departments in all the federative units having its headquarters in the city of Rio de Janeiro. It operates in nine Technological Axes (Environment and Health, Educational and Social Development, Management and Business, Information and Communication, Infrastructure, Cultural Production and Design, Hospitality and Leisure, Food Production, Security) and its segments (Beauty, Health, Environment, Education, Social, Languages, Management, Commerce, Computing, Telecommunications, Conservation and
Janitorial, Arts, Fashion, Communication, Design, Tourism, Leisure, Hospitality, Gastronomy / PAS, Food Production, Security), with more than 800 courses in its different typologies. The elaboration of its offer plan requires a complex planning, given the variety of its portfolio and its performance in several municipalities of the State of Ceará. The analysis and decision of which courses will be offered, in which units, on what dates and at what times are a joint responsibility between the managers of the operative units, technical consultants (collaborators of NCAS specialists in certain areas) and the planning team of the institution. Factors such as the development of the region, history of courses, demands by area, investments, business strategy, are criteria for creating the business map. In addition to logistical issues such as environmental capacity, available resources, various periods and schedules, which are factors considered for the decision process of the course offereding in the operation phase. The objective of this work is to create a proposal to assist the assertiveness of the choice of the offer, aiming to launch for the market the courses with the greatest degree of accuracy in its sale, given a set of necessary restrictions so that the result achieved is viable and of better result possible. Exposed the difficulty of choosing a viable offer that respects all the necessary restrictions for its execution, such as: market, employability, supply assertiveness, school education, characteristics of the locality, population, besides other factors, we opted for the use of the structured methodology in multi-criteria, so that through a well-qualified modeling of the criteria, we have as a result a proposal of courses offers with the greatest possibility of success, serving as an auxiliary tool in the decision making in the offer of these courses.
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DECISION ANALYSIS One of the definitions of Decision Making Process [1] is that it is a cognitive process that results in the selection of an option between several alternatives. It is widely used to include preference, inference, classification, and judgment, whether conscious or unconscious. In management, decision making is the cognitive process by which a plan of action is chosen among several others (based on varied scenarios, environments, analyzes, and factors) for a problem situation. Every decision-making process produces a final choice. The output may be an action or an opinion of choice. That is, decision-making refers to the process of choosing the most appropriate path to the company, in a given circumstance. Relevant points for structuring the decision-making process: Level of importance within the organization: ✓
Highly important;
✓
Less important;
✓
Important;
✓
Not important.
✓
Fairly important; Structuring:
✓
Structured;
✓
Routine or cyclical;
✓
Not structured.
✓
Not routine or cyclical;
✓
Predictability:
✓
Unpublished.
Any decision-making process in a company has a direct impact on its results, be they strategic, tactical or operational, so mechanisms should be created to support decision-makers, use of technology and good practices for mapping related variables to the problem has a direct influence on the quality of the decision. According to [3], a potential action constitutes the object of the decision or that which is directed to support the decision, which is considered as potential when it is possible to apply it, or simply when it deserves some interest in the decision support process. Identified at the beginning of the decision process or over it and may become a solution to the problem being studied.
2.1
MULTICRITERIA SUPPORT FOR THE DECISION Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) consists of a set of methods and techniques to assist or support individuals and organizations in making decisions, given a multiplicity of criteria. Its best-known methods came in the 1970s. The multicriteria allow structuring the control events that are being analyzed and to order them according to the degree of importance in the decision-making process of the search of the diagnosis, when of its application [2]. There are several approaches and characteristics that play a key role in the methodologies applied in the decision-making process. Here, we will mention some differences between American and European schools, where the former uses a more rational methodology and always seeks a more objective solution. The European defends humanity in the decision process, strengthened through subjectivity as a character of choice and the search for learning and a real understanding of the problem. The multicriteria problems have the following classifications in table 1:
Table 1: Classifications of multicriteria problems
The Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) has as main objectives:
analysis of the decision process, with the objective of identifying critical information/regions
a better understanding of the problem dimensions
possibility of having different valid formulations for the problem
acceptance of the fact that, in complex problems, situations do not always have to forcibly fit into a perfect formalism. Structures that only partially represent the comparability between alternatives may be relevant to the decision support process.
the use of explicit representations of a favourite structure can often be more appropriate to a decision-making problem
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COGNITIVE MAPPING One of the definitions found is they are schematic structures or graphical representations of a set of ideas and concepts, arranged in a kind of network of propositions, in order to present more clearly the exposure of a knowledge. The Conceptual / Cognitive Map was developed in the 1970s by the American researcher and navigator Joseph Novak, initially proposed as an administrative tool, to organize and represent knowledge in general, basically being an improvement of the well-known organizational chart, aimed to be used in teamwork and/or in a collegiate. According to [4, 7 and 8], it allows us to portray ideas, feelings, values and attitudes and their interrelationships, in a way that makes possible the study of a problem and its subsequent analysis, using a graphical representation. According to Ackermann et. al. (2004), this tool is used to structure and analyze the problems, which can be mapped through verbal or documented interviews. For the problem addressed in this work, we use cognitive mapping as a playful tool to visually represent the relevant criteria that the NCAS/Ceará decision makers team analyzes and studies for the choice of courses offered. According to [5], the cognitive map makes it possible to know the problem variables from the point of view of several people directly involved in the activity. Knowing the constraints, criteria and objectives of the task studied. During the creation of the cognitive map, it is possible to capture the decision maker information about goals and purposes and means objectives of the problem in order to obtain sufficient information about the decision criteria. Cognitive mapping has several types of graphical representation [9, 14 and 15]; I cite some more known for example Spider Web, Flowchart and Hierarchical. They are chosen according to the best way to display each problematic, we must reinforce that the visual form of the map has as the main purpose to indicate
to the readers the whole context of the problem/objective in a way that is explicit and intuitive the relevance of the criteria and their relationships.
3.1
CONSTRUCTION OF THE COGNITIVE MAP FOR STRUCTURING A MULTICRITERIAL MODEL FOR COURSE OFFERING In order to reach the objective proposed by the study, we developed a structured cognitive map in the multicriteria approach mapping the main criteria, variables, alternatives and relationships in the decisionmaking process of choosing a vocational course in NCAS/Ceará, aiming the creation of a viable model for assertiveness in this offer.
We followed a 4-step process:
This process allowed us to capture the individuality of each technician responsible for the area of course development and then through the congregation of these ideas new criteria emerged because of the connections found between the individual mappings. In this sense, [6] emphasize the importance of interviews. At this step, he should avoid interfering with what they say (empathic approach), as this could misdirect the name inappropriately. In step 1, we follow the following steps:
Step 1: Defining a label The NCAS/Ceará has as strategic objective a reduction in costs and improve the assertiveness in the offer of its courses, since the erroneous offer of a course causes a significant damage to the company, as besides the costs of dissemination, elaboration, allocation of resources, among others, brings to the company a problem of credibility with its clients, because often due to the low demand is necessary to cancel the offer and the few clients who wish to carry out the courses are disappointed. Unit managers, technical consultants, and planning management are the decision makers. The label for the problem was defined "Assertiveness in the courses offering”.
Step 2: Definition of the Primary Assessment Elements (PAEs/EPAs) The PAEs are the concepts that the decision maker considers relevant about the problem and transmits them to the facilitator at the time of the interview in the form of phrases. Examples of PAEs for the problem of offering courses: high profitability, taking into account regional characteristics, diverse client profiles, professional qualification and inclusion in the labor market and courses for teams/companies and entrepreneurs.
Step 3: Construction of concepts Moreover, each PAE should be modified by including some verbs for the infinitive suggesting that the PAE be action-oriented.
Example of modified EPAs: choose courses with high profitability, promote courses attending to regional characteristics, serve diverse client profiles, promote professional qualification and inclusion in the job market and perfect teams/companies and develop entrepreneurs;
Step 4: Construction of the concept hierarchy In this stage, the classification was created by means of ordering on the concepts developed in the previous stages: Furthermore, example of ordering: 1st: choosing courses with high profitability, 2nd: promoting professional qualification and inclusion in the labor market, 3rd: improving teams/companies, developing entrepreneurs, 4th: attend diverse profiles of client and 5th: promoting courses taking care of the regional characteristics; Also, in step 2, the entire decision-making body was presented, the individual maps validated, and their concepts and variables validated for the objective, in this step were adjusted some points, so that we did not have very distant criteria from the intended purpose, we know that for each variable there can be "N" relationships, but we must choose wisely which ones are relevant to each scenario. We then review and validate the individual maps in the light of the main objective that is assertiveness in the course offering. Moreover, in step 3, once the individual maps were validated, we entered the aggregation phase of these maps, aiming at the construction of a map in order to provide the vision of the process as a whole, allowing illustrating to the decision maker all the criteria that should be analyzed and prioritized for the decision-making process. Also, n step 4, we developed an aggregate cognitive map with the whole group, taking into account all the procedures performed in the previous steps and aiming to reach the objective proposed by the work. Figure 1 shows the criteria that the group indicated as relevant for the decision making of the choice of courses: Figure 1: Cognitive map for course offerings
The elaborated map indicated several essential characteristics for the decision making in the offer of courses. They reflect the complexity and the work required to define the course offering, such as characteristics of the course, characteristics of the population, characteristics of the locality, characteristics of the market, client profile, among others, are extremely important in this choice. Once this survey has been made, it is necessary to establish which criteria are most relevant, so these can be used to help in choosing the best course offer. After analyzing the team, eleven items with the highest degree of importance for decision making are listed: Public Policies / Government Incentives, Improvements / Updates / Market Trends, Profitability (Courses must promote high profitability), Investment (Courses require high investment by the student), Employability (Courses promote a high rate of employability for the student), Business opportunity (Courses promote good business opportunity for the student), Regional (Courses must meet the regional characteristics of the places of offer), Customer Profile (Courses must be selected according to the client profile), Costs (High Cost Courses for SENAC), Infrastructure (Courses that need a specific infrastructure) and Competition (The courses are chosen taking into account the competition) Questions like, what criteria have more weight or more priority, profitable courses? Courses targeted to the customer profile found? Is there any population investment power? What costs will be incurred for the offer of this course, is it advantageous? Is it necessary to meet the regional characteristics? By capturing these responses, it will be possible to qualify the criteria subjectively and prioritize the degree of importance of each topic in the decision-making process for the offer.
3.2
PRIORITIZATION OF CRITERIA After the elaboration of the cognitive map, the selection of the most relevant criteria and elaboration of the questions that must be answered for each criterion, we move on to the "ranking" phase of the criteria selected for the decision-making process. We chose to apply a questionnaire that individually scored each criterion on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is no importance and five high importance. The intention was to individually measure each item, with the vision of each technician separately. The questionnaire template that was sent to the e-mail of those involved in the criteria prioritization process is published at the address: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1YDw76YYmkk9aoicd0tFlyGUPBk1LIFnuGZxUYMVtpVM/edit.
On the other hand, fourteen professionals in their various activities within the context of education answered the questionnaire, aiming at the miscegenation in several optics on the subject, among the actions we have: Technical Consulting of Educational Products, Coordination of Graduate Courses, Teachers, Management of Information Technology, Management of Professional Education Center, Education Unit Coordinator, Development Management and Educational Technology, Pedagogical Consulting, Coordination of the Bank of Opportunities, Educational Direction, Strategic Business Management and Administrative and Financial Directorate. Moreover, as a result of the application of this questionnaire, we obtained the following classification of the descriptors in table 2:
Table 2: Prioritization of the criteria - Result of the questionnaire applied
Once categorized, descriptors will play a fundamental role in the decision-making process [10, 11, 12 and 13], it is up to the company to create mechanisms to capture information that subsidizes decision-makers when looking at each criterion, using ranking as a way of maximizing which approaches and which offer will be chosen for each need.
4
RESULTS As a result of this work, we have the application of the process of cognitive mapping where it was possible to raise all the criteria and relationships necessary for the decision making of vocational courses offering at NCAS/Ceará. It was proposed a multicriteria structured model that aims, from the classification by means of priority ranking, which criteria should have greater weight in the decision of the course offering, aiming for a greater assertiveness in the sale, making use of a defined process that promotes the collection, analysis, tabulation and results, through various sources of data entry, whether they come from own systems, research sources, available research bases, BI, etc.
5
CONCLUSION Cognitive mapping is an efficient way of capturing subjective perceptions. Its use allows several decision-makers to present their views, in a very personalized way and at the same time, through "negotiations" with the other decision-makers, searching a general consensus. It allows decision-makers learning and understanding other ways of approaching problematic situations, other than those they see themselves.
In decision-making contexts where conflicting interests of heterogeneous groups occur, it is a great way to address complex problems [16 and 17]. For the scenario imposed by the work, it was a dynamic, playful, clear and objective approach, as it proved to be very efficient in the survey of several characteristics necessary for the cost-supply process. Ideas and thoughts that are often forgotten in the individuality of each one, have emerged and converged to a viable and validated model for all, a process that can now be executed with the support of computational resources, aiming for quality, assertiveness, and support in the processes of decision-making necessary for the institution's vitality. We have a future work proposal, the application of this prioritization model in a real scenario, using real databases with the necessary characteristics for the model, courses mapping, data collection of a region served by NCAS/Ceará, client mappings, and all the possible factors pointed out as relevant in the cognitive mapping of this problem. The purpose of the work will be to indicate which courses should be offered to the chosen region, respecting the prioritization of the criteria established by the decision makers and their restrictions.
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