* Our Decision: Your Actions *
| Staff Allocation Planning |
Skilled Human Resources- Challenge of Proper Utilization
Human resources (staff pool) is critical to your operations. They are valuable with their ability to service customers, control production, carry out maintenance operation with the ability to handle different situations as things unfold. Repetitive jobs with limited complexity unfortunately will be bot operated in near future (realities of our time), but many areas like Healthcare service, technicians fixing things, plant operators, customer service etc. will still have shifts requiring personnel.
Challenges-
Unlike equipment’s engagement of human personnel’s have some more rules. They are not available 24×7 and each individual does not have the same design specifications i.e. skills.
Key aspect of running smooth operation is to allocate staff optimally given constraints of-
- Varying requirement of skilled staff across shifts and days
- Availability time windows of staff-leave, vacations
- Suitability of different jobs in operations to different staff
- Requirement of several criteria for a job- combination of experience, certification, skills
- Compatibility of people working in team shift
- Labour/personnel laws/policies restricting long assignments or back to back shift assignments
- Varying Costs of staff
- Preference of payroll or contracted staff or pre-booking/fixed preferences
- Equitable distribution of staff hours allocation with groups of similar staff
- Shared staff across shifts and departments
- Etc.
Prevalent Practices & Our Differentiated Solution
When managers/ planners set out to do this exercise in a spreadsheet / drag n drop interface / using rule based simulations, they face following challenges-
- With whatever criteria of priority they start assignments/allocation they will hit exceptions/ infeasibilities (unless they have surplus staff which may not always be the case). Then they need to change things and face other infeasibilities. Just making a feasible plan with staff size >25 is difficult
- Primary objective is feasibility. cost and unbiased allocations take a back stage.
- Unfortunately even with best plan and best intentions, it would be hard to have all staff members happy with the allocation decisions.
- Time to re-allocate in case of changes and disruptions can be long. One change also has cascading impact, which needs to be staff and time adjusted.
Our XPlan Staff allocation planning helps you to evaluate all possible options and prescribes cost optimal allocations while be compliant to labour laws and be objective and fair in assignments.