Design Of Performance Appraisal System For Research And Development Personnel

In the era of knowledge economy, innovation is an important part of enterprisecompetitiveness. Enterprise innovation, especially the improvement of technology or theupdate of products and service, has gradually become the critical factor that influences thesuccess of the enterprise. As carriers of knowledge, R&D personnel are the source ofenterprise innovation. They use their technical expertise to survey, probe, analysis, andsolve key problems in production and management aspects of the enterprise. Performanceappraisal plays an important role in management of R&D personnel. It can not onlyprovide the basis for R&D personnel’s training, re-allocation, salary, and motivation, butalso help them improve their performance. The performance of R&D personnel is hard tobe quantified and observed. It depends on teamwork and generated long after R&Dpersonnel work. Besides, R&D personnel’s work is professional and has high risks.Traditional performance appraisal methods are not suitable to this kind of workers.Therefore, to design a scientific performance appraisal system of R&D personnel has bothpractical significance and research challenges.This paper includes six parts. They are foreword, literature review, theoretical basis,designing the performance appraisal system of R&D personnel, instance, conclusion andoutlook. In foreword, the author summarizes the background, purpose, and significance ofthis study. That is in the era of knowledge economy, to design a scientific performanceappraisal system of R&D personnel has both practical significance and researchchallenges. Then, the author generalizes research methods and the technical route of thispaper, and raises the innovative point of this paper. That is this paper develops a scientificperformance appraisal system of R&D personnel which combined both the advantages ofAHP and those of BP neural network. It not only riches studies about performanceappraisal system of R&D personnel, but also expands the application of AHP and BPneural network.In literature review, the author reviews classical performance appraisal methods andtheir application in recent respect studies. This paper divides performance appraisalmethods into subjective appraisal methods and objective appraisal methods. By analyzingfeatures and application of each performance appraisal method and considering the traits ofR&D personnel’s performance, the author holds that AHP and BP neural network are themost suitable performance appraisal methods that can be used to appraisal the performanceof R&D personnel.In theoretical basis, this paper summarizes related concepts and theories ofperformance appraisal and R&D personnel. Then, the paper introduces basic theories and features of AHP and BP neural network.In designing the performance appraisal system of R&D personnel, this paper firstlyanalysis the job of R&D personnel by studying literature, generalizes critical workresponsibilities of these workers, and develops performance appraisal indicators of R&Dpersonnel. Secondly, the paper uses AHP to select key performance appraisal indicators,develops the performance appraisal model of R&D personnel based on AHP, and getsrelevant appraisal results. Thirdly, the paper uses the worked samples data to train the BPneural network, develops the performance appraisal model of R&D personnel based onBP neural network, and gets relevant appraisal results. Finally, the paper develops theperformance appraisal model of R&D personnel based on AHP-BP neural network bycalculating weighted sums of the appraisal results of AHP and those of BP neural network.In instance, this paper takes performance appraisal on R&D personnel in Company Aas an example, uses Super Decisions and Matlab7.0to build performance appraisal modelsof R&D personnel based on AHP, BP neural network, AHP-BP neural network and getsthe results of these three models. By comparing and analyzing these three results, this papercertifies that the model based on AHP-BP neural network works best. Finally, this papergets the final result by developing a performance appraisal system of R&D personnelbased on AHP-BP neural network.In conclusion and outlook, the author summarizes the results and deficiencies of thispaper. That is the performance appraisal system of R&D personnel developed in this paperhas high appraisal accuracy. It has both the advantages of AHP and those of BP neuralnetwork. And it not only avoids the subjectivity of AHP resulted from expert experience,but also weakens the strong objectivity of BP neural network. However, the performanceappraisal indicators used in this paper is too generalize to be applied in the practice of R&Dpersonnel’s performance appraise. And problems such as how to apply this system inproject management, how to distinguish a worker’s performance from a team’sperformance is to be studied.