Observing Group Meetings

As part of our class assignment we were asked to identify a current workplace problem or decision and apply Edward de Bono’s (n.d.), “Six Thinking Hats” model of decision making and present our recommendations to our senior manager. Good intro!

Discussion

Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics is a new branch of Siemens, which is currently one of the biggest companies across the world. Similar to GE here in the United States, Siemens is very large company composed of many smaller divisions that have either been purchased and now carry the Siemens name, or divisions that have been created by Siemens from the floor up. Our division concentrates on Healthcare and providing new and reliable automated medical instrumentation to large research labs, hospitals and private laboratories.

Our department, Headquarters Global Product Support, provides technical third level support to Field Service Engineers and Technical Support Centers throughout the world. In addition, we also interact with several departments within the organization to help identify and improve product reliability and customer support. One of our biggest responsibilities is to ensure that issues being reported by our Field Engineers are investigated, confirmed and addressed. We also seek to improve current processes and product reliability. Depending on the issue being reported or improvements implemented, our level of interaction with other departments may vary.

Our medial instrument operates on a Windows based Operating System with our preparatory software and other field service utilities preloaded in every system. As many Windows Operating Systems, our instrumentation may encounter unrecoverable errors and require Windows and our software to be reloaded. When these errors occur we reload all of the software using a method called Ghosting. Ghosting is a process in which a snapshot of an Operating System at one particular point is taken and copied to a removal media such as a CD or DVD disc. This image can than be loaded on any computer and it will automatically load all of the systems programs and software in one action. This process can be viewed as copying and pasting an entire computers operating system and software while overwriting all data. It allows us to keep a clean and safe restore point for all of our systems. The downside or con is that the image must be updated every time our software is updated or the system hardware is changed. As part of our company policy, every time the image is revised, it needs to be validated to ensure its integrity. This process can be very lengthy and difficult to trace because our systems also vary in hardware also require a different ghost image to be created.

To date, we have four variations of hardware which requires four ghost images to be created every time our software is updated. In efforts to improve of process we have discussed ways to improve the entire process, and have

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