The Classification of Workforce Requirement Planning for Service Oriented Operations

In today’s world of competitive international economy sectors, service industry orservice sector oriented businesses, the key point is to maximize the efficiency and sustainability of the business directly related with optimal planning of the workload and distributing them among the employees. Helpdesks and operation centers are one of the fastest developing service area of this sector. This paper compares the machine learning algorithms that can be used for the classification of workforce requirements for a bank operation center which provides support to reduce operational workload of bank branches. Classification of the workload based on the quantity of Money Order and EFT operations within time zones aids in the management of workforce teams and distribution of jobs between team members

LETRIS: Staffing service systems by means of simulation

Purpose: This paper introduces a procedure for solving the staffing problem in a service system (i.e., determining the number of servers for each staffing period). Design/methodology: The proposed algorithm combines the use of queueing theory to find an initial solution with the use of simulation to adjust the number of servers to meet previously specified target non-delay probabilities. The basic idea of the simulation phase of the procedure is to successively fix the number of servers from the first staffing period to the last, without backtracking. Findings: Under the assumptions that the number of servers is not upper-bounded and there are no abandonments and, therefore, no retrials, the procedure converges in a finite number of iterations, regardless of the distributions of arrivals and services, and requires a reasonable amount of computing time. Originality / value: The new procedure proposed in this paper is a systematic, robust way to find a good solution to a relevant problem in the field of service management and it is very easy to implement using no more than commonly accessible tools.Peer Reviewe

PENDEKATAN DUA-STEP UNTUK MASALAH PENJADUALAN PERSONIL SATUAN PENGAMANAN

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengembangkan model matematik masalah penjadualan personil pada perusahaan penyedia layanan jasa keamanan. Pada masalah ini, setiap shift akan diisi oleh seorang personil dan jika banyaknya shift dialokasikan dengan maksimum, maka personil yang tersedia kurang dari banyaknya shift per hari untuk semua lokasi. Selain itu, setiap personil dibolehkan days off dalam horison perencanaan. Masalah diformulasi dalam model pemrograman integer binari dan diselesaikan dengan menggunakan pendekatan dua-step. Step pertama bertujuan untuk memaksimumkan kinerja melalui maksimisasi alokasi shift, sedangkan pada step kedua bertujuan untuk meminimumkan biaya dengan mempertimbangkan kendala alokasi shift dan batasan pada personil. Studi kasus dilakukan pada perusahaan penyedia layanan jasa keamanan skala kecil di mana terdapat prioritas terhadap beberapa lokasi. Hasil menunjukkan bahwa terdapat kesesuaian dengan tujuan yang diharapkan dan kendala yang dihadapi

Bi-objective Evolutionary Heuristics for Bus Drivers

The Bus Driver Rostering Problem refers to the assignment of drivers to the daily schedules of the company's buses, during a planning period of a given duration. The drivers' schedules must comply with legal and institutional rules, namely the Labour Law, labour agreements and the company's specific regulations. This paper presents a bi-objective model for the problem and two evolutionary heuristics differing as to the strategies adopted to approach the Pareto frontier. The first one, the utopian strategy, extends elitism to include an unfeasible solution in the population, and the second one is an adapted version of the well known SPEA2 (Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm). The heuristics' empirical performance is studied with computational tests on a set of instances generated from vehicle and crew schedules. This research shows that both methodologies are adequate to tackle the instances of the Bus Driver Rostering Problem. In fact, in short computing times, they provide the planning department, with several feasible solutions, rosters that are very difficult to obtain manually and, in addition, identify among them the efficient solutions of the bi-objective model

A SIMULATION BASED SCHEDULING MODEL FOR CALL CENTERS WITH UNCERTAIN ARRIVAL RATES

In this paper we develop a two stage algorithm for scheduling call centers with strict SLAs and arrival rate uncertainty. The first cut schedule can be developed in less than a minute using a constructive heuristic. The schedule is then refined via a simulation based optimization approach. We find that when allowed to run for five minutes or less this two stage process can create a schedule with a total expected cost within a few percentage points of schedules generated using much more computationally intensive methods. This rapid scheduling process is designed to support front line managers who wish to evaluate multiple scheduling options in a what if analysis mode

Soft systems methodology: a context within a 50-year retrospective of OR/MS

Soft systems methodology (SSM) has been used in the practice of operations research and management science OR/MS) since the early 1970s. In the 1990s, it emerged as a viable academic discipline. Unfortunately, its proponents consider SSM and traditional systems thinking to be mutually exclusive. Despite the differences claimed by SSM proponents between the two, they have been complementary. An extensive sampling of the OR/MS literature over its entire lifetime demonstrates the richness with which the non-SSM literature has been addressing the very same issues as does SSM

Modeling the labor scheduling problem considering wellbeing for the clinic’s employees

Resumen El problema de la programación de turnos de trabajo, consiste en programar el horario de trabajo o los turnos de los distintos empleados buscando la minimización de los costos asociados al personal, el cual es un problema NP-hard. En este artículo se presenta un modelo de programación lineal entera mixta aplicado a un caso real, el cual tiene como objetivo minimizar el costo laboral, cumplir con los requerimientos de demanda y establecer condiciones laborales adecuadas para los empleados mediante la incorporación de restricciones que garanticen bienestar, para así generar una asignación óptima de los turnos de trabajo de los fisioterapeutas en las áreas de cuidados intensivos e intermedios de una Clínica. Para esto, se definieron diferentes escenarios variando tanto el número de fisioterapeutas como la estructura del modelo, resultando así que el número apropiado de fisioterapeutas a programar en la Clínica es de 32, ya que satisface todos los requerimientos de demanda, la legislación laboral, y las necesidades de la empresa y de los empleados. Abstract The Labor Scheduling Problem consists of planning the shifts for the employees, and minimizing costs associated to the workforce, which is a NP-hard problem.This paper presents a mixed integer linear programming modelapplied to a real case, which minimizes labor costs, satisfies the requirements of demand and establishes adequate working conditions for employees by incorporating constraints that ensure well-being to generate an optimal assignment of physiotherapist shifts in the intensive and intermediate care areas in a Clinic.For this, different scenarios were defined by varying both the number of physiotherapists and the structure of the model, the result that the appropriate number of physiotherapists in the clinic schedule is 32, since it satisfies the requirements of demand, employment law and the needs of the company and employees

On the transhipment approach to personnel scheduling with fluctuating demands

A particular type of personnel scheduling is concerned with the assignment of employees where the number of jobs vary from period to period during the workday. This paper presents a mathematical approach, namely the transhipment method, for use in problems of this type