1.Introduction
The phrase “business process reengineering” (BPR) first appeared in 1990, raised by Michael Hammer in a Harvard Business Review paper called “Reengineering work: Don't automate, obliterate” [1]. Hammer believed that, although in the fiercely competitive environment of the 1990s most businesses were adopting measures such as rationalization and automation to improve their organizations, none of these measures was truly improving business operations. Many businesses were also spending millions of dollars to improve or implement new information technology; however, these efforts served only to strengthen the existing false working processes, thus causing organization costs to increase, with negligible gains in improved performance. To solve these problems, the idea of “engineering” was advanced as a theory and tool for business reorganization. In Hammer's fundamental definition, BPR starts from very basic issues and asserts that the reengineering process can dramatically improve an organization in terms of its costs, quality, services, and speed. For this purpose, three BPR “cores” are insisted on in Hammer's article: process reorganization, the use of information technology, and organizational redesign [2]; that is, a successful implementation of BPR depends not only on process innovation, but also on organizational changes [19].
To implement the BPR, existing activities spread among different departments are integrated into a single complete process designed to fulfill a specific business goal. However, when business functions are integrated, new processes with multiple functions are easily impeded by departmental barriers within function-based organization structures. Conversely, process execution is smoother in a team-based organization [2,20]. A work team is a cross-functional unit consisting of workers from relevant departments. In a team-based organiza- tion, department barriers do not exist and business resources can collaborate to achieve the process targets. Due to the fundamental differences between team-based and function- based organization structures, both the organization and the human resource need to be reorganized to match the redesigned processes. In addition, as companies grow, the growth of organization is continuous; therefore human resource planning for future project loading is equally essential for construction companies.
As is apparent from the above, the prudence and efficiency of a human resource planning directly influences the success of the BPR. Thus, a reliable methodology to create a team-based organization depending on operation processes, and to determine credible laborpower capability for allocating human resources is essential and significant for construction companies.
However, for human resource planning, most approaches allocate laborpower in construction projects based on the assumption of a steady organization structure for executing processes [3,4], or some forecast human resource requirement depending on mass sampling survey with statistical analysis [5]. In most cases, these would be valid methods in an organization- steady company. However, considering the changes of processes and of organization structure after process reengi- neering, this study applied the simulation method for labor- power allocation and prediction.
Simulation method has been applied widely in construction processes and resource management issues [6–13,21]. Con- struction simulation was introduced by Halpin [7] with the development of the CYCLONE modeling methodology [7,11]. Due to its using small abstract set of basic modeling elements, CYLCONE framework is probably the most commonly known of construction-specific process simulation techniques [14]. However, fewer simulation researches and applications were aimed at construction management process- es and organization behaviors. To analyze behaviors of a concurrent design team, Jin and Levitt [15,16] developed the virtual design team (VDT) simulation environment and described three different approaches to the simulation of organizational behavior and discusses the issues related to how to create a computational organization model for simulation [15,16]. According to Levitt's researches, char- acteristics of activities, human resource, information flow and
input to
organization structure are all crucial for analyzing organizations.
Consequently, this study combines the BPR philosophy, team approach and simulation method to demonstrate a team- based human resource planning (THRP) model. Applying the THRP model, a team-based organization can be designed based on the reengineered processes; therefore, the corresponding maximal project loading of laborpower can be determined, and vice versa, the laborpower required for expected project loadings can also be evaluated. Typically, a real construction company's BPR case is illustrated in this paper to confirm the feasibility of the THRP model.