Modeling staffing flexibility: A case of China

Crew Allocation System for the Masonry Industry

“…Instead, the skills that a worker has can determine which tasks the worker can perform. Some workers have one or more skills and a worker who posseses different categorical skills is referred to as a multi-skilled worker (Gomar et al, 2002;Florez et al, 2013) or a crosstrained worker (de Matta and Peters, 2009;Li and Li, 2000).…”

Workforce planning incorporating skills: State of the art

“…Therefore, the speed of work/efficiency, the quality of work and the costs are normally not affected by those skills. However, as Table 4 shows, Li and Li [88] and Corominas et al [43] also consider the impact of categorical skills of the workers on the efficiency. This is because these authors assume that when a worker who normally performs a certain task must suddenly perform another task (for which he is also licensed), he will be less efficient.…”

“…In an environment with categorical skills, people with different skills can do different tasks, but there is no performance difference between two employees with different skills. When the workforce is cross-trained, people can perform different tasks that differ from their normal (or core) tasks which can lead to a decrease in performance [47,88]. Corominas et al [43] even assume different efficiencies for each worker for each different task.…”

“…Recall from Section 3.2 that flexibility can also be obtained by substitution and cross-training. Li and Li [88], for example, explicitly model the cross-training cost of a worker to create flexibility and the cost of hiring a new permanent worker. Furthermore, they incorporate the possible decrease in efficiency caused by letting the workers deviate from their core task (see Section 3.2) to compensate for the high cost of hiring a new permanent worker.…”

“…In [57,76,88,93,104], the planning decision for cross-training the workforce is incorporated in the model. A decision is made about how many employees should be trained to acquire certain skills.…”