An Automated Workforce Clustering Method for Business Process Reengineering in Research and Development Organizations

摘要

Business process reengineering (BPR) involves the radical redesign of functional organizations into cross-functional teams to achieve dramatic improvements in productivity. Redesigning complex and dynamic processes in research and development (R&D) organizations with multi-layer projects is a difficult task. Previous researchers have proposed many intuitive approaches for BPR utilizing intuition and subjective judgment from "experts " at various stages of their implementation. However, the complexities inherent in large R&D organizations have restricted the effectiveness of their use in practice. The authors present an automated and structured analytic algorithm that eliminates the need for subjective human judgment. The proposed method facilitates the reorganization of R&D processes into cross-functional work units and projects. The efficacy of the algorithm is confirmed with a small problem and the applicability of the proposed method is demonstrated at the Air Force Research Laboratory.