OPTIMAL WORKFORCE CONFIGURATION INCORPORATING ABSENTEEISM AND DAILY WORKLOAD VARIABILITY

This paper is one in a series that introduces concepts of Just-in-Time -Personnel. Management of worker job time and assignment is in many wa ys analogous to inventory management. Idle workers represent unutilize d, ''inventoried'' personnel, imposing potentially large costs on mana gement. But a lack of workers when needed may force the use of otherwi se unnecessary overtime or other emergency procedures, creating excess ive costs analogous to costs of stockout in traditional inventory syst ems. A system having Just-in-Time-Personnel attempts to meet all deman ds for personnel at minimum cost by sharply reducing both excess worke r inventory with its concomitant ''paid lost time'' and underage of wo rker inventory with its associated costs of stockout. In this paper, a workforce is assumed to comprise three types of equally proficient wo rker: full timers, scheduled part times and call up temporaries. Each day the facility employing the workers must perform an amount of work that varies randomly from day to day, according to a normal distributi on. If, due to random absenteeism, insufficient numbers of scheduled w orkers appear on a given day, management must employ overtime and/or t emporaries to complete the workforce complement. For large facilities, we formulate this problem mathematically and develop an algorithm for management to optimally configure the workforce, where the design cri terion is minimization of average daily cost, and where certain reason able management-stated constraints limit the number of design options available.