For the effective promotion of software process improvement (SPI) activities in a large-scale organization, it is necessary to establish an organizational structure and a deployment method for promotion and to develop training courses, support tools, and other materials. Even if an organizational promotion system is established, the SPI activities of each development department cannot be promoted effectively without SPI community. To promote SPI activities throughout the TOSHIBA group, we organized a Corporate Software Engineering Process Group in April 2000. We also have been focused to establish SPI community, while promoting SPI activities in each development department. The fundamental our operating policy of SPI is "bottom-up". This paper discusses the problems encountered in the promotion of SPI activities and presents solutions to the problems. The actual results obtained show that the framework and solutions developed by us can be used to effectively promote SPI activities.

In this paper, a macro-level scheduling method is developed to provide high-level planning support for factories with multiple coordinating cells. To model the problem with manageable complexity, detailed operations of a product within a cell are aggregated as a single operation whose processing time is related to the amount of resources allocated. "Overload variables" are introduced and penalized in the objective function. The goal is to properly allocate resources, efficiently handle complicated process plans, and coordinate cells to ensure on-time delivery, low working-in-process inventory, and small resource overload. The formulation obtained is "separable" and can be effectively decomposed by using Lagrangian relaxation. A combined backward and forward dynamic programming (BFDP) method is developed to solve a product sub-problem after a novel transformation of its process plan. The BFDP is further simplified and solved approximately.