**7. Conclusions**

In Make‐to‐Stock, Assemble‐to‐Order and Make‐to‐Order production, assignment models for the allocation of employees assume that tasks of production processes (or routings) are of a fixed structure. Managers believe they found the most 'efficient' process of producing prod‐ ucts and, therefore, all current optimization models are searching for appropriate employees for that process. Small deviations between the required and the actual knowledge are resolved with alternative routing; its structure is also known and fixed in advance. All of this is possible because extra time is invested for testing and preparing optimal processes for many repetitions. Extra time is also invested for finding employees with proper knowledge for that processes. This is the case of known theoretical and practical solutions of worker assignment problem.

However, in ETO production, and consequently in all knowledge‐intensive processes or case‐ like processes, we determined that processes are structured around the available knowledge of employees. Otherwise, the cost of searching for missing knowledge in the form of a new employee could exceed all the added value to the business. Process 'cases' are never the same and each process 'repetition' requires a process structure that is adapted to the actual knowl‐ edge and its capacity in the company; the bottleneck is not the capacity of the employee but the capacity of his/her specific actual knowledge. With the activity‐cutting principle in our assignment model, we proved that we can release the 'hidden' time capacity of employee who is the bottleneck so that we could remove all activities and consequently the knowledge that is also available with other employees from the work position. We recommend that this principle can be an option of all assignment models for the allocation of employees for ETO production and all other knowledge‐intense companies. This is our main contribution to the theory of modelling worker assignment problem.

Of course, this research raises additional questions for our future work, especially in the field of practical application: is knowledge the right category in our assignment model or is it bet‐ ter to use all measureable work habits and personal skills [33]? There are also assumptions in **Table 4** that will need additional research and explanation. Nevertheless, our concept of redefining tasks with the goal of reaching optimal worker knowledge alignment could be used as a 'smart' reorganization principle for dynamic and real‐time redefinition of processes in companies, where the standardization of tasks is not the main factor of reaching efficiency.
