Scheduling and Rostering of Temporary Staff to Deal with Periodically Increasing Demand in Retail Sector: An Application

Abstract

Temporary employment is a need to meet periodically increasing demand. It is arranged for a limited number of days and its service quality output is observed instantly. These make the planning phase complicated. In the process, the priority of businesses is to meet the increasing demand and to regulate the workload according to the terms of the period. Solving the periodic increase in demand by providing permanent employment can cause businesses to face the costs arising from excess employment in the long term. Generally, businesses manage these periods by hiring new staff. The most critical problems of the process are the suitability of the temporarily employed staff to work and whether they are suitable for the competencies in the job description. It is expected to achieve an efficiency equivalent to the cost to be incurred for this need that occurs in certain time periods. Adaptation processes, the effects of today's pandemic virus, and ergonomics issues owing to some tasks are the other basic constraints of this planning process. In this study, the problem of scheduling and rostering of staff requested for the problem of staff shortage owing to periodically increased demand has been solved. 50 candidate staff were evaluated in 4 competency types. Thus, an optimized service quality and staff costs has been achieved for this periodic staff need. For problem solving, 0-1 integer programming model was established and the proposed model, is written in ILOG CPLEX Studio IDE and is solved with the CPLEX solvent.

Keywords

• Staff scheduling
• Rostering
• 0-1 Integer programming
• Increasing demand
• Staff competency

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