Process evaluation and design are both important and closely related areas in systems and industrial engineering. Most processes and systems in reality concern the integration of multiple inputs to produce multiple outputs (or multi-criteria), and the processes will continue over time. To reflect the true system performance, it is crucial to incorporate the dynamic interplay between different productive factors in performance evaluation. The challenge here is to develop a comprehensive evaluation approach that can estimate and incorporate dynamics in production. Meanwhile, we too are often confronted with multiple criteria in designing processes. In today’s competitive market, fast decision-making and accelerated information obsolescence have both become a commonplace. Therefore process designs, as well as evaluation of designs, often have to be based on limited information about different designs’ performance, and we should develop different approaches correspondingly. In this presentation, I will discuss and respond to the above challenges in the evaluation and design of processes. In the first part I will discuss an evaluation approach, based on Data Envelopment Analysis, to the multi-factor evaluation of dynamic production processes. This research shows that ignoring dynamic effects could lead to biased evaluation results. The second part of this presentation will cover methodologies for simulating design performance in two different scenarios of information availability. The methodologies are illustrated by examples of order picking systems and R&D project selection.

Chien-Ming Chen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Decision and Information Sciences at Rotterdam School of Management of Erasmus University in the Netherlands. He obtained the B.E. degree in Urban Planning from National Cheng-Kung University in Taiwan, and a MBA degree from National Central University, Taiwan. Before he joined RSM, he had worked as a production supervisor in AU Optronics Corp—the third largest designer and manufacturer of TFT-LCD in the world. He was also a contracted researcher in Industrial Economics & Knowledge Center of Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Taiwan. He joined the PhD program at RSM in 2005, and he will defend his dissertation, “Measuring supply chain performance: process evaluation & design,” by June of 2009. He has published his work in European Journal of Operational Research, and has papers currently under review in Operations Research, Production and Operations Management, and International Journal of Production Economics. He also has presented his research at multiple international conferences. His main research interests include: Process Evaluation & Design, Topics in Environmental Performance and Management, New Product Development, and Simulation Modeling.