Skill-Specific Workforce Scheduling in Service Sector Organizations through Flexible Working Arrangement Clusters

Author(s)

Thusitha Rodrigo ,

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Volume 7 - April 2018 (04)

Abstract

This paper focuses on skill-specific workforce scheduling in service sector organizations with variable demands. We use flexible work arrangement (FWA) strategies in obtaining minimal workforce combinations to cater service demand. The problem setting is such that the fluctuating service demand requires continuous availability of skill-specific workforce to provide timely service delivery. The solution combines a skill specific workforce-scheduling model with a selected cluster of FWAs to form an algorithm that (i) minimize labour utilization in a service sector organization with variable demand, (ii) compare the effect of individual and combinations of FWAs in improving the objective function (iii) examine the influence of different FWAs and skill combinations towards increased workforce requirement.  We formulate the problem as a mixed integer program with an innovative algorithm to solve it in reasonable computational time. We test the model through a case study on a medium scale South Asian airline MRO (maintenance repair & overhaul) organization with satisfactory results

Keywords

Operations Research in service organizations, Workforce Scheduling, Flexible work arrangements, Integer programming, airline MRO industry  

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