Performance opportunity for workforce agility in collaborative and noncollaborative work systems

To gain insight into the potential logistical benefits of worker cross-trai ning and agile workforce policies, we study simple models of flexible worke rs in serial production systems. The primary control issue is how to assign workers to jobs/stations over time. Under assumptions of complete worker f lexibility and collaborative work, we prove that a simple expedite policy m inimizes along each sample path the cycle time (delay) for each job. Theref ore, the expedite policy also minimizes work in process and maximizes throu ghput along every sample path. We also compute the performance improvement opportunity achievable using flexible workers as opposed to the optimal sta tic allocation of workers. This enables us to examine the factors that make workforce agility a potentially attractive strategy. We also consider the intuitive analog of the expedite policy for the noncollaborative work envir onment, which we call the pick-and-run policy; however, we demonstrate by c ounterexample that it is not always optimal. Finally, we extend some of our insights from the demand-constrained environment to a capacity-constrained environment operating under a CONstant WIP (CONWIP) protocol.