Category Archives: Scheduling

Scheduling Consecutive Days Off A practical problem encountered in man: service  organizations is setting schedules so that employees can have two consecutive day – off even though the operation is open seven days a  week. The importance of the problem sterns  from the fact that the Fair Labor Standards Act requires that overtime be paid for an} hour worked (by hourly workers) in excess of 40 hour- per w

AUTOMATED  SCHEDULING FOR SERVICE WORKERS Kronos, lnc., located in Waltham, Massachusetts, provides a fully automated Workforce Management System that consists of the following three major modules: (a) Business Forecaster, (b) WorkForce Planner, and (c) Smart Scheduler. The Business Forecaster module uses historical data from POS systems, traffic counters, and other source  to develop a forecast of future

The use of Technology in Scheduling As in most facets of business, information technology has had a significant impact on the ability of the manager to schedule workers. Early computer programs for scheduling workers were often cumbersome to use and also very limited in their applications. However, the advent of faster and more powerful computers coupled with newer software programs has  resulted in worker sche

Converting Worker Requirements into Daily Work Schedules The next step in the scheduling process is the conversion of  order requirement for each time interval into a daily work or shift schedule, The basic goal here is to schedule a sufficient number of workers in a given time period to meet the expected demand at the target service level. However, there are usually add.iional factor, that also need to be incl

Converting Customer Demand into Worker Requirements Worker requirements· in service operations can be divided into two major categories: front-of-the-house and backof the-house. Front-of-the-house workers are defined as those who have direct contact with the customer. Examples would include a teller at a bank, a cashier at a discount department store. or the check-in personnel at an airline counter. Back-of-the-

Scheduling Workers in Service Operations Why Scheduling Is Important in Services As discussed previously. one of the main distinctions between manufacturing and service operations is the customer’s direct interaction with the service delivery process. Because of this interaction, the determination of the proper number of workers to schedule at any particular  tme is critical to the success of every service

Control in the Job Shop  Scheduling job priorities is just one aspect of shop-floor control (now often referred to as production activity controls.  The American Production and Inventory Control Society (APICS) Dictionary defines a shop-floor control system as shop-floor control The major functions of shop-floor control are 1. Assigning priority to each shop order. 2. Maintaining work-in-process (“IP) qu

OPT is a software system that contains a proprietary algorithm for production scheduling. From OPT (optimized production technology) has evolved the managerial concept of theory of constraints lTOC). OPTffOC is a production planning and control (PPC) method that attempts to optimize scheduling by maximizing the utilization of the  bottleneck in the process. Traditional production planning and control is consid

Scheduling n Jobs on m Machines Complex Job Shops Complex job shops are characterized by multiple machine centers processing a variety of  different jobs arriving at the machine centers in an intermittent fashion throughout the day. If there are n jobs to be processed on an machines and all jobs are processed on all machines. then there are (n !) alternative schedules for this job set. Because of the large number

Scheduling n Jobs on Two Machines The next step up in complexity of job shop types is the nl2 case, where two or more jobs must be processed on two machines in a common sequence. As in then] I case, there is an approach that leads to an optimal solution according to certain criteria. Also, as in the nil case, we assume it is a static scheduling situation. The objective of this approach, termed Johnson s rule no