Using neural networks for identifying organizational improvement strategies

The struggle to remain competitive in the global marketplace occupies much of the energy of today's firms. Although there are many performance improvement strategies that can be implemented by an organization, it is yet to be determined which strategy or combination of these strategies, if any, is most helpful in improving performance. A genetic algorithm trained neural network is used to identify such combinations to provide direction to managers as to which performance improvement strategies are associated with increases in performance as reported by operations managers. This study shows that this neural network approach can identify combinations that result in better approximations of performance, as compared to standard statistical techniques, and should be considered as an appropriate tool for performance improvement strategy selection.