The use of decision support systems to innovate the process of contracting for goods and services at the Marine Corps Eastern Recruiting Region Regional Contracting Office

摘要

Process innovation combines a process view of business with the application of innovation to effect order-of-magnitude improvement in performance. In order to gain the order of magnitude change that is required for process innovation, the key processes must be redesigned from beginning to end using all the innovation techniques and resources available to an organization. A knowledge-based decision support tool called KOPeR-Lite was developed to assist Business Process Reengineering (BPR) novices in process innovation. KOPeR-Lite utilizes knowledge gained from BPR experts and the literature to perform measurement-driven inference. Such inference is used to interpret empirical measurements, diagnose process pathologies and match such diagnoses with appropriate transformations. This research assesses the effectiveness of process innovation techniques by examining the relative performance of BPR novices who use KOPeR-Lite with that of novices who do not use this system. Based on the results this research then employs KOPeR-Lite along with Davenportαs innovation framework to redesign the process of contracting for goods and services at the Marine Corps Eastern Recruiting Region Regional Contracting Office. If implemented, the proposed redesigns offer considerable promise to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the contracting process.