個案資料

In September 2016, a senior consultant at the Indore campus of the Central Institute of Management and Consulting (CIMC) was busy preparing some documents for a meeting on a transportation problem the organization was facing. CIMC Indore’s chief operating officer had requested his assistance to resolve the transport department’s issues. Management was incurring substantial yearly costs for maintenance related to the drivers that operated the various vehicles of the organizations. There was also a need to rationalize the workload of the drivers to avoid dissonance among employees. Following his meeting with the chief operating officer, the senior consultant saw an opportunity to reduce the annual cost of drivers, while addressing some of the dissatisfaction that was present among drivers concerning their schedules and workload.

The case serves as a learning tool to understand the concept of workforce scheduling. The case is suitable for courses on operations management, service operations, quantitative methods, decision sciences, or operations research for postgraduate or undergraduate students. It is also suitable for training courses on service operations, in general, and logistics, in particular, for working executives and industry practitioners.<br><br>Students should have an awareness of the philosophy of optimization, linear programming, and solving optimization problems using the Microsoft Excel solver tool. Students should have had exposure, either in theory or in practice, to the service industry or logistics, to be able to better relate to the context in the case.<br><br>The central idea of the case is employee scheduling, which is a crucial subject in any service operation. The learning goals for students encapsulated by the case are as follows:<ul><li>Familiarization with a medium-scale transport service and the challenges of workforce allotment and of rationalizing workloads</li><li>Identification of the obstacles in implementing an efficient optimization model for a public sector organization</li><li>Familiarization with workforce management, specific to employee scheduling, considering variations in demand and work shifts</li><li>Formulation and solving of a human resources scheduling problem with the help of an advanced Microsoft Excel solver tool</li></ul>

• Optimization, Scheduling