Creativity in decision-making is increasingly focusing on providing solutions that consider how different approaches and different ideas work productively together. This is particularly evident in the operations management field. In order to support such a decision-making revolution, the nature of inter-organisational collaboration is changing and requires a higher degree of tactical and strategic co-ordination as well as the design and implementation of new decision-support tools and information sharing schemas with network partners. Therefore, the study of collaborative decision-making trends and solutions and their contribution to improved operations and business performance is presented as a theme of contemporary interest and for both practitioners and academics. It is a pleasure for the EURO Working Group on Decision Support Systems (EWG-DSS) to introduce this special issue of the Production Planning & Control Journal on ‘Collaborative Decision-Making and Decision Support Systems for enhancing Operations Management in Industrial Environments’. This special issue has focused on bringing together a range of papers that address and implement collaborative solutions for supporting the design of production systems. The papers finally accepted and published in this special issue have been subject to a rigorous peer review process, based on initial editor screening and anonymous refereeing by four independent highly-qualified expert referees. Hence, we would like to thank all the authors and reviewers for their efforts and for their valuable feedback within this process. Six papers from a total of twenty-six submissions have finally made it through the two-stage review process. Each of these papers has not only employed a thorough methodological approach but has also attempted to address real industry problems, solutions and challenges. The final set of papers provides a knowledge confluence for research into decision support systems, collaborative solutions and operations management in a variety of industrial environments. Firstly, we were very pleased to receive the manuscript ‘A knowledge chain management framework to support integrated decisions in global supply chains’ from Shaofeng Liu, Jonathan Moizer, Phil Megicks, Dulekha Kasturiratne and Uchitha Jayawickrama. The authors have proposed a global knowledge chain management framework that identifies and prioritises critical knowledge that global supply chain environments can consider for supporting their integrated decisions. From their results of their study, manufacturing industries can understand and visualise better how to support integrated decisions under a global supply chain perspective. Also from a global decision-making perspective, the next contribution is made by Andrés Boza, M.M.E. Alemany, F. Alarcón, Llanos Cuenca entitled ‘A model-driven DSS architecture for delivery management in collaborative supply chains with lack of homogeneity in products’. In this paper, a model-driven decision support system has been conceived to support the process of re-allocating available inventory in collaborative supply chains. The main implications of using and implementing the developed collaborative solution are demonstrated in an application in the ceramics industry. The third contribution ‘Supporting the collaborative decision-making process in an automotive supply chain with a multi-agent system’ is by Jorge E. Hernández, Andrew C. Lyons, Josefa Mula, Raul Poler and Hossam Ismail. Linked to the a novel combination of collaboration, supply chain design, operations management and decision support systems, this paper presents a generic collaborative solution, implemented in the automotive industry, which supports multi-level decision-making processes in multi-level supply chain environments from a tactical point of view within a negotiation process. Based on a multi-agent system implementation, it demonstrates that profit and service level for every supply chain node, and the supply chain as a whole, can be improved by re-engineering the supply chain to support a collaborative decision-making design. In line with the previous papers, the fourth contribution, from Julien Maheut, Juan Manuel Besga, Jone Uribetxeberria and Jose P. Garcia-Sabater, deals with the operational perspective of the collaborative decision-making process in supply chain networks and is entitled ‘A Decision Support System for modeling and implementing the Supply Network Configuration and Operations Scheduling problem in the machine tool industry’. The key thrust of this paper concerns a simulation-based decision support system to simultaneously solve a supply network configuration problem and an operations scheduling problem for the machine tool industry. Moreover, by evaluating different operations management indicators, a case study based on a company that assembles highly customized machines and tools in several European plants is considered. The fifth contribution is provided by Arijit Bhattacharya, Priyabrata Mohapatra, Vikas Kumar, Prasanta Dey, Malcolm Brady, Manoj Tiwari and Sai Nudurupati with a paper entitled ‘Green Supply Chain Performance Measurement using Fuzzy-ANP based Balanced Scorecard: A Collaborative Decision-Making Approach’. This work concerns green supply chain management with an application focusing on carpet manufacturing in the UK. Based on this collaborative decision making proposal and a fuzzy-Analytic Network Process, managers are assisted in deciding if the suppliers’ performances meet the industry and environment standards and whether the human resource is effective. Finally, the sixth contribution from Victoria Muerza, Daniel de Arcocha, Emilio Larrodé and José María Moreno-Jiménez, explores the application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process in combination with decision support systems for selecting the best product in a process of technological diversification from a collaborative perspective. This paper entitled ‘The Multicriteria Selection of Products in Technological Diversification Strategies: an Application to the Spanish Automotive Industry based on AHP’ presents an original methodology and decision support tool that is applied to the Spanish automotive sector. Finally, we hope you will find all the addressed contents useful and interesting to tackle many of the collaborative challenges, in terms of research and practice activities to be referenced in the future when addressing any of the related research areas.