A Three-Stage Manpower Planning and Scheduling Model—A Service-Sector Example

Abstract

This paper presents a staff planning and scheduling model that has specific application in the nurse-staffing process in acute hospitals, and more general application in many other service organizations in which demand and production characteristics are similar. The aggregate planning models that have been developed for goods-producing organizations are not appropriate for these types of service organizations. In this paper the process for staffing services is divided into three decision levels: (a) policy decisions, including the operating procedures for service centers and for the staff-control process itself; (b) staff planning, including hiring, discharge, training, and reallocation decisions; and (c) short-term scheduling of available staff within the constraints determined by the two previous levels. These three planning “levels” are used as decomposition stages in developing a general staffing model. The paper formulates the planning and scheduling stages as a stochastic programming problem, suggests an iterative solution procedure using random loss functions, and develops a noniterative solution procedure for a chance-constrained formulation that considers alternative operating procedures and service criteria, and permits including statistically dependent demands. The discussion includes an example application of the model and illustrations of its potential uses in the nurse-staffing process.

Workforce planning in the printing industry

“…Constraints (2) assure that the available working time for each process i meets at least the demand of working time of process i for all jobs. Of course, pß and b have to be measued in the same time units.…”

“…Most of the literature spent on this issue deals with special branches, especially the Service sector, where demand for shifts and schedules is highly constrained (see the variety of modeis, a Igorith ms and applications in, e.g, Pinedo 2005). On the other hand, short-term scheduling procedures affect the level of Staffing that should be provided (see Abernathy 1973). The literature which deals with such interdependencies provides multi-stage integrated models for Staffing and rostering.…”

Employee substitutability as a tool to improve the robustness in personnel scheduling

“…As such, the personnel planner should account for uncertainty in the personnel planning process. This process generally consists of three hierarchical phases where the higher phases constrain the lower phases (Abernathy et al 1973;Burke et al 2004). We distinguish the strategic staffing phase, the tactical scheduling phase and the operational allocation phase.…”

Operations risk management by optimally planning the qualified workforce capacity

“…We demonstrate it using different extensions of the stochastic programming version of the aggregate planning model. The Aggregate Planning Model (APM) was developed in the middle of last century and has been successfully applied in production planning problems, see [29,17,12], and manpower planning problems, see [21,10,2].…”