Telephone Sales Manpower Planning at Qantas

Gaballa, Adel; Pearce, W.

doi:10.1287/inte.9.3.1

Cited by 42 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…MT1 represents a traditional approach to setting the desired staffing levels and is the one a manager will see upon examination of the scheduling literature (Andrews and Parsons, 1989;Brewton, 1989;Buffa et al, 1976;Gaballa and Pearce, 1979;Holloran and Byrn, 1986;Kolesar et al, 1975;Kwan et al, 1988;Segal, 1974;Thompson, 1992). The employee requirement for a period originates from an M/M/s queuing model, and equals the smallest number of employees who can provide the threshold level of customer service (serve the target percentage of customers within the specified waiting time).…”

Section: A Traditional Methods Of Setting Employee Requirements (Mti)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Each method shares the same objective: find, for each planning period, the smallest number of staff that will deliver the threshold level of customer service, defined as "serving at least c percent of customers with a wait for service not to exceed z periods". Service levels of this form may be seen in Agnihothri and Taylor (1991) Andrews and Parsons (1989), Brewton (1989), Buffa et al (1976) Gaballa and Pearce (1979) Holloran and Byrn (1986), Kwan et al (1988), Segal (1974), and Thompson (1992). Such an approach to determining employee requirements applies when ".…”

Section: Cl(r)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Measured as Levels Underlying (true) customer arrival-rate pattern (4) Coefficient of variation of the true customer arrival-rate pattern (2) Mean service rate (4) Underlying (true) service-rate pattern (4) Variation in the service-rate pattern (2) Threshold customer service level (3) Accuracy of the customer arrivaland service-rate forecasts (3) Scheduling flexibility (2) Method of setting the employee requirements (2) A pattern Average percentage of customers served within the specified waiting time 1989; Caballa and Pearce, 1979;Harris et al, 198'7;Holloran and Byrn, 1986;Kwan et al, 1988;Paul and Stevens, 1971;Quinn et al, 1991;Segal, 1974); stable underlying customer arrival-rate and service-rate functions; the employees work as scheduled (no employees are tardy or absent); once service starts for a customer, it is never interrupted.…”

Section: Factor (Number Of Levels)mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Accounting for the multi‐period impact of service when determining employee requirements for labor scheduling

Thompson

1993

J of Ops Management

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Providing good customer service, inexpensively, is a problem commonly faced by managers of service operations. To tackle this problem, managers must do four tasks: forecast customer demand for the service; translate these forecasts into employee requirements; develop a labor schedule that provides appropriate numbers of employees at appropriate times; and control the delivery of the service in real‐time. This paper focuses upon the translation of forecasts of customer demand into employee requirements. Specifically, it presents and evaluates two methods for determining desired staffing levels. One of these methods is a traditional approach to the task, while the other, by using modified customer arrival rates, offers a better means of accounting for the multi‐period impact of customer service. To calculate the modified arrival rates, the latter method reduces (increases) the actual customer arrival rate for a period to account for customers who arrived in the period (in earlier periods) but have some of their service performed in subsequent periods (in the period). In an experiment simulating 13824 service delivery environments, the new method demonstrated its superiority by serving 2.74% more customers within the specified waiting time limit while using 7.57% fewer labor hours.

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Section: A Traditional Methods Of Setting Employee Requirements (Mti)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Cl(r)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Factor (Number Of Levels)mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Accounting for the multi‐period impact of service when determining employee requirements for labor scheduling

Thompson

1993

J of Ops Management

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“…Break placement is very often an influential factor in making the set covering approach intractable and has therefore been investigated in several papers. An integer programming approach is proposed in Gaballa and Pearce (1979). Flexibility in break placement is incorporated by including a separate variable for every feasible break option allowed in a shift.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

A Benders Decomposition-Based Matheuristic for the Cardinality Constrained Shift Design Problem

2015

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The Shift Design Problem is an important optimization problem which arises when scheduling personnel in industries that require continuous operation. Based on the forecast, required staffing levels for a set of time periods, a set of shift types that best covers the demand must be determined. A shift type is a consecutive sequence of time periods that adheres to legal and union rules and can be assigned to an employee on any day. In this paper we introduce the Cardinality Constrained Shift Design Problem; a variant of the Shift Design Problem in which the number of permitted shift types is bounded by an upper limit. We present an Integer Programming model for this problem and show that it's structure lends itself very naturally to Benders decomposition. Due to convergence issues with a conventional implementation, we propose a matheuristic based on Benders decomposition for solving the problem. Furthermore, we argue that an important step in this approach is finding dual alternative optimal solutions to the Benders subproblems and describe an approach to obtain a diverse set of these. Numerical tests show that the described methodology significantly outperforms a commercial Mixed Integer Programming solver on instances with 1241 different shift types and remains competitive for larger cases with 2145 shift types. On all classes of problems the heuristic is able to quickly find good solutions.

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“…The concept of call centers appeared in the 1980s (Gaballa and Pearce 1979;Cohen 1980;Cardoso 2000;Hawkins et al 2001). A call center constitutes a set of resources that enable the delivery of services via the telephone.…”

Section: Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contact center: information systems design

2010

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The economic sector of contact centers is growing by more than 8% a year. It is a multidisciplinary area in which information systems are decisive to organizations' success. Contact Centers' Information Systems deal with real time requisites and critical business information. A theorybuilding research shows a framework with 12 key design factors to consider, which managers might use to develop projects and researchers may adopt for further investigation in the area of Contact Center design. This work intends to provide a valuable link between the research community and practitioners in industry.

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Telephone Sales Manpower Planning at Qantas

Cited by 42 publications

References 0 publications

Accounting for the multi‐period impact of service when determining employee requirements for labor scheduling

Accounting for the multi‐period impact of service when determining employee requirements for labor scheduling

A Benders Decomposition-Based Matheuristic for the Cardinality Constrained Shift Design Problem

Contact center: information systems design

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