Workforce Planning Incorporating Skills: State of the Art

Bruecker, Philippe De; Bergh, Jorne Van den; Beliën, Jeroen; Demeulemeester, Erik

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2437372

Cited by 20 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 118 publications

(337 reference statements)

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“…Scholars have started to incorporate the factor of people's experience (i.e., doing tasks that best fit people's skills) in workforce planning, including staffing and scheduling decisions (De Bruecker et al 2015), but few studies in volunteer management have done so. Research on volunteer experience focuses on disaster settings when the needs of the population, the availability of volunteers and their skills change over time.…”

Section: Volunteer Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Volunteer Management in Charity Storehouses: Experience, Congestion and Operational Performance

Urrea

Pedraza‐Martinez

Besiou

2019

Production and Operations Management

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We study volunteer management at a charity storehouse operated by a large faith‐based organization. The storehouse runs entirely on volunteer efforts. We investigate the role of volunteer experience and storehouse congestion in the preparation of orders using a multi‐method approach. First, we conduct a field study to explore these relationships and collect data at the level of volunteers’ teams. These teams can pair volunteers with either different levels of experience (mixed pairing) or equal levels of experience (no‐mixed pairing). Second, we estimate the effects of volunteer experience and storehouse congestion on the order processing times empirically. Third, we build a simulation model to study how operational decisions—volunteers’ pairing in teams and whether to allow or impede storehouse congestion—affect two performance metrics: on‐time order preparation rate and additional time to prepare the orders, in steady conditions. Then, we simulate disaster conditions at the storehouse, that is, simultaneous surges in supply of volunteers and demand of orders. Contrary to extant literature on team collaboration, we find that no‐mixed pairing outperforms mixed pairing under disaster conditions with storehouse congestion. In fact, no‐mixed pairing improves the on‐time order preparation by 4.32% and the additional time to prepare the orders by 14.42% compared to mixed pairing. Moreover, under disaster conditions, a “controlled congestion” policy at the storehouse delivers the best performance metrics.

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Section: Volunteer Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Volunteer Management in Charity Storehouses: Experience, Congestion and Operational Performance

Urrea

Pedraza‐Martinez

Besiou

2019

Production and Operations Management

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“…The state-of-the-art on workforce planning problems assuming different skills of workers is given in De Bruecker et al (2015). A workforce assignment problem with a total cost minimization criterion, in which a higher qualified worker can substitute a lower qualified one, but not vice versa, was investigated by Özgüven and Sungur (2013) and Sungur and Yavuz (in press).…”

Section: Overall Statement Of the Problem And Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Workforce minimization for a mixed-model assembly line in the automotive industry

Battaïa

Delorme

Dolgui

et al. 2015

International Journal of Production Economics

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International audienceA paced assembly line consisting of several workstations is considered. This line is intended to assemble products of different types. The sequence of products is given. The sequence of technological tasks is common for all types of products. The assignment of tasks to the stations and task sequence on each station are known and cannot be modified, and they do not depend on the product type. Tasks assigned to the same station are performed sequentially. The processing time of a task depends on the number of workers performing this task. Workers are identical and versatile. If a worker is assigned to a task, he/she works on this task from its start till completion. Workers can switch between the stations at the end of each task and the time needed by any worker to move from one station to another one can be neglected. At the line design stage, it is necessary to know how many workers are necessary for the line. To know the response to this question we will consider each possible takt and assign workers to tasks so that the total number of workers is minimized, provided that a given takt time is satisfied. The maximum of minimal numbers of workers for all takts will be considered as the necessary number of workers for the line. Thus, the problem is to assign workers to tasks for a takt. We prove that this problem is NP-hard in the strong sense, we develop an integer linear programming formulation to solve it, and propose conventional and randomized heuristics

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“…The skills involved can be either categorical or hierarchical. Categorical skills are binary in nature, and as such are either possessed or not possessed at all (Bruecker et al, 2014). When skills are hierarchical, they can be performed at different levels, as it has been assumed by some previous research (Pinker, 2009;Azizi & Liang, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Calibrating cross-training to meet demand mix variation and employee absence

Olivella

Nembhard

2016

European Journal of Operational Research

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Abstract:We address the problem of determining the cross-training that a work team needs in order to cope with demand mix variation and absences. We consider the case in which all workers can be trained on all tasks, the workforce is a resource that determines the capacity and a complete forecasting of demand is not available. The demand mix variation that the organization wants to be able to cope with is fixed by establishing a maximum time to devote to each product. We contend that this approach is straightforward, has managerial practicality and can be applied to a broad range of practical scenarios. It is required that the demand mix variation be met, even if there are a certain level of absences. To numerically solve the mathematical problem, a constraint-based selection procedure is developed, which we term CODEMI. We provide illustrated examples demonstrating solution quality for the approximation, and we report on an illustrative set of computational cases.

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Workforce Planning Incorporating Skills: State of the Art

Cited by 20 publications

References 118 publications

Volunteer Management in Charity Storehouses: Experience, Congestion and Operational Performance

Volunteer Management in Charity Storehouses: Experience, Congestion and Operational Performance

Workforce minimization for a mixed-model assembly line in the automotive industry

Calibrating cross-training to meet demand mix variation and employee absence

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