Labour flexibility and assignment policies in a job shop having incommensurable objectives

This study evaluates operating policies for offering a near-perfect deliver y performance for vital customers in dual resource-constrained (DRC) job sh op environments. Prior studies have considered this problem in machine-limi ted settings, and shown that dispatching rules that help realise a near-per fect delivery performance for vital customers necessarily deteriorate deliv ery performance for other customers served by the shop. This study extends prior work, and considers additional tools that can be used by managers in DRC shops such as labour flexibility, and assignment rules that incorporate customer-based information to deploy workers to departments containing hig h-priority jobs. Results show that labour flexibility in conjunction with a ppropriate decision rules allows for enhanced delivery performance for both vital and normal priority customers. These results hold even under conditi ons where 80% of the shop's workload is compromised of high-priority orders .