**1. Introduction**

Global competitiveness requires constant innovations of products and processes, which inher‐ ently require changes on the part of production companies. Management of these changes is especially important for those companies for which the production of new products is a regular business, that is, for which every customer requirement is so unique that it requires for the integration of research and development (R&D) department employees to a certain level. Linking of sales, R&D and production in such way is called an 'Engineering‐to‐Order

production strategy' (ETO). Products in ETO production have a complex structure and a cus‐ tomer‐specified production that is treated as a project. These projects are generally unique and were never previously executed. Therefore, it is impossible that they be handled with existing standard project activities. Problems with the allocation of employees appear in the first activi‐ ties of the ETO production project, in which activities require a high level of innovation, and the project requires a proper knowledge allocation prior to capacity allocation. Of course, the management needs both allocation views, but the knowledge aspect is more important when dealing with new product or technology changes. The typical question before executing each ETO project is: Do we have appropriate knowledge to do that?

Knowledge is an element of the employees and also an element of the activities of business processes [1]. In Make‐to‐Stock (MTS), production activities are highly specialized and require a small set of required knowledge. In ETO production, employees execute many activities with a large set of required knowledge. Due to salary requirements, the human‐resource‐ required knowledge is linked to the work position definitions [2]. The management goal is to optimize the required knowledge of work positions and the current knowledge of employ‐ ees. With every product or process change, the knowledge structure of the work position is changed. If changes are permanent, there will be a continuous searching for new appropriate employees. However, what if the process of change was adjusted so that it took into consider‐ ation currently available knowledge? These employees are the only source that is available at the time a new product requires new knowledge in the process. What if the capacity load of each employee's knowledge and not just the employee's capacity in general were taken into consideration?
