Employee churn prediction

Customer churn is a notorious problem for most industries, as loss of a customer affects revenues and brand image and acquiring new customers is difficult. Reliable predictive models for customer churn could be useful in devising customer retention plans. We survey and compare some major machine learning techniques that have been used to build predictive customer churn models. Employee churn (or attrition) closely related but not identical to customer churn is similarly painful for an organization, leading to disruptions, customer dissatisfaction and time and efforts lost in finding and training replacement. We present a case study that we carried out for building and comparing predictive employee churn models. We also propose a simple value model for employees that can be used to identify how many of the churned employees were “valuable”. This work has the potential for designing better employee retention plans and improving employee satisfaction.     

Empowerment scheduling for a field workforce

Employee empowerment is a flexible management concept. As in traditional scheduling, the employer is still in charge of assigning jobs to staff. However, employees are allowed to express their preferences for the jobs they want to do. The hope is that empowerment will improve morale, which will improve productivity. The challenge is to design such an empowerment scheduling system without undesirable outcomes.     

Employee Goal Orientation,Work Unit Goal Orientation and Employee Creativity

For employee creativity to occur, organizations must build a context conducive to creativity, in addition to identifying employees with creative potential. Complementing and extending earlier research, we develop and test a cross‐level model about how work unit goal orientation might relate to employee creativity. We also theorize and examine the mediating role of employee information elaboration linking work unit goal orientation and employee creativity. We conduct a questionnaire survey based on multi‐source data from 340 employees comprising 53 teams in eight Taiwanese organizations. The results indicate that the work unit goal orientation is positively, whereas the work unit performance‐avoidance orientation is negatively, related to employee creativity through employee information elaboration. Furthermore, work unit goal orientation also plays a cross‐level moderating role: the positive relationship between individual‐level learning orientation and information elaboration is stronger when work unit learning orientation is higher, but weaker when work unit avoidance orientation is higher.     

E-empowerment: Empowerment by the Internet

This article focuses on the concept of empowerment and the ways in which the Internet is being utilized as an empowering tool. This analysis ranges from the personal to the global levels and the consequences of that empowerment are also discussed. We propose a four-level model that serves to explain what we term E-empowerment and the effects that can be observed at each of the four levels, ranging from (1) the personal; (2) the interpersonal; (3) group; and (4) citizenship. The potential for future development of E-empowerment is also discussed.     

企业员工培训管理系统的设计与实现

随着经济全球化发展,知识更新速度加快,企业员工培训将日益成为企业的一项重要业务,今后企业的竞争将是企业员工素质的竞争,开发一个功能完善的软件来辅助员工管理培训业务是增强企业竞争力的一项重要措施。该文介绍了在VB．NET环境下开发该系统的设计思想和设计过程,从软件工程的角度进行了科学而严谨的阐述。     

Empowerment Strategies for Ideation through Online Communities

Successful ideation is vital for new product development. In a novel approach, firms have recently and successfully empowered their customers through online communities by applying democratic principles to open innovation. In this paper, we borrow insights from the democratic system to examine the enhancement of, and the boundary conditions for, the adoption of this empowerment strategy. We conducted three series of experiments to investigate whether online community size and lead user status might affect the link between empowerment strategy and perceived impact. This study also highlights the double‐edged influence of the selected outcome of an empowerment task by focusing on the negative emotions that threaten the effectiveness and sustainability of empowerment strategy. Our results show that empowerment strategy in small communities and higher lead user status can produce higher perceived impact. In addition, the outcome of empowerment strategy may engender positive and negative emotions in members of the community, which leads to distinct and different corresponding behaviour. The theoretical and practical implications of our research are discussed in the conclusion.     

Employee positioning and workload allocation

Assigning tasks to employees is a difficult task. Errors committed in such assignments can have far-reaching consequences, such as reduced efficiency due to absenteeism, lack of job satisfaction, formal grievances, and generally deteriorating labor relations. This paper approaches the problem from a spatial point of view. First, the employees and the relevant tasks are mapped in a skill space. After feasible task assignments are determined, tasks are assigned to employees so as to minimize employee—task distances in order to avoid boredom, and minimize disequity between the individual employees’ workloads, and minimize costs. Computational results are provided for an engineering department of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile.     

公司员工体检信息系统

介绍了广东核电合营有限公司员工体检管理信息系统的功能与实现。     

Implementing remote evaluation

Remote evaluation (REV) is a construct for building distributed systems that involves sending executable code from one computer to another computer via a communication network. How REV can reduce communication and improve performance for certain classes of distributed applications is explained. Implementation issues are discussed. REV is incorporated into a high-level programming language by defining its syntax and its semantics. The compile-time and run-time support for REV is discussed in both heterogeneous and homogeneous systems and compared to that needed by a remote procedure call implementation. Sample performance measurements are included. Experience with a prototype REV implementation is summarized     

Implementing Ada Exceptions

Can exceptions be implemented for Ada without imposing overhead on normal execution? Yes, as long as certain rules are followed.     

Modelling and Solving Employee Timetabling Problems

Employee timetabling is the operation of assigning employees to tasks in a set of shifts during a fixed period of time, typically a week. We present a general definition of employee timetabling problems (ETPs) that captures many real-world problem formulations and includes complex constraints. The proposed model of ETPs can be represented in a tabular form that is both intuitive and efficient for constraint representation and processing. The constraint networks of ETPs include non-binary constraints and are difficult to formulate in terms of simple constraint solvers. We investigate the use of local search techniques for solving ETPs. In particular, we propose several versions of hill-climbing that make use of a novel search space that includes also partial assignments. We show that, on large and difficult instances of real world ETPs, where systematic search fails, local search methods perform well and solve the hardest instances. According to our experimental results on various techniques, a simple version of hill climbing based on random moves is the best method for solving large ETP instances.     

Requirements Engineering, Soft Systems Methodology and Workforce Empowerment

The fidelity and practicality of using soft systems methodology (SSM) to empower the workforce such that its members can make a fuller contribution to the requirements engineering process is critically analysed. The detailed analysis is carried out by using a (critical) philosophical approach to develop an interpretation of (some key aspects of) requirements engineering practice in actual information systems development situations, utilising a number of practical requirements engineering studies. This analysis is built upon to explain the relationship between requirements engineering, SSM and workforce empowerment. It is concluded that, by maintaining critically focused attention on the economic context, it is theoretically possible to engineer requirements for information systems that would actually empower the workforce. However, the likelihood of using SSM successfully for this purpose is low, as the economic context in which requirements engineering takes place is largely ignored by the SSM advocates.     

Implementing dialogue independence

Separating the development of the core application from that of its user interface provides encapsulation, flexibility, and reuse advantages, but poses the problem of how to mirror changes to one component in the other. The authors identify three design patterns that achieve this mirroring while maintaining dialogue independence     

Implementing Nominal Unification

Nominal matching and unification underly the dynamics of nominal rewriting. Urban, Pitts and Gabbay gave a nominal unification algorithm which finds the most general solution to a nominal matching or unification problem, if one exists. Later the algorithm was extended by Fernández and Gabbay to deal with name generation and locality.In this paper we describe first a direct implementation of the nominal unification algorithm, including the extensions, in Maude. This implementation is not efficient (it is exponential in time), but we will show that we can obtain a feasible implementation by using termgraphs.     

Implementing mass customization

Total Customer Satisfaction today can mean embarking on “Mass Customization”: giving every customer a product tailored specifically to his or her needs. In the past, manufacturing was usually “high volume, low mix”, characterized by keeping costs down with economies of scale, or “low volume, high mix”, incurring costs and time for changeovers and special handling. Today's mass customization, however, can result in a challenging manufacturing environment with both high volume and high mix, where customers expect individualized products at the same price they paid for mass-produced items. Meeting this challenge requires changes in the manufacturing processes. Equipment must be more flexible. Most important are the computer systems which support the manufacturing enterprise. Never has data been so essential to define, control, and monitor manufacturing as with mass customization. Motorola's product lines — from the pagers with millions of possible options, to the cellular phones and semiconductors — are all experiencing the move to mass customization. This presentation will describe some Motorola examples and the methods used to achieve world-class manufacturing under these conditions.     

Implementing a methodology

Many good information systems methodologies are not used to full effectiveness by the organizations that acquire them. This is often due to inadequate planning of the implementation of the methodology and inadequate consideration of the opportunities for organizational change that the methodology creates. This paper discusses the implementation of a methodology as a special case of the management of change.     

Implementing concurrent C

Concurrent C (C++) is a parallel superset of C (C++). Versions of Concurrent C have now been implemented for a variety of uniprocessors and multiprocessors. We first implemented a uniprocessor version of Concurrent C correctly anticipating that it would be relatively easy to extend the uniprocessor implementation to run on multiprocessors. Concurrent C is translated to C. The generated C code contains calls to the C library implementing the Concurrent C run-time system. This paper describes the ‘hard core’ details of the Concurrent C implementation: the specifics of process states, the data structures used, the library functions, and the C code generated for various Concurrent C constructs. We also give an overview of the Concurrent C facilities and of the uniprocessor, distributed and shared-memory multiprocessor implementations.