Quantification of Inter-Functional Relations in Work Processes Based on Information Contents

Abstract

In order to improve or reconstruct office work processes, not only modeling methods to describe the current ("as-is") status of work process, but also analysis methods to evaluate efficiency of the process and to give guidelines toward the desirable ("to-be") process are important. This paper proposes a method to quantify the relationship between functions in a process described by IDEF0 and to find function groups with low coupling and high cohesion. In office works, a function can be characterized by information contents on its inputs and outputs. Therefore similarity of functions can be defined by categolizing information on I, C and O of each activity. Then relation of functions can be quantified based on the similarity using Hayashi's quantification method of the third type. The proposed method is applied to a practical logistics process of manufacturing company to validate the method.