Controlling workforce resource actions for demand disturbances in services supply chains

Abstract

Demand disturbances in service businesses can produce undesirable effects such as reduced service level, reduced utilization, and oscillation of workforce availability. The disturbances are typically managed by resource actions such as hiring, releasing and cross training the workforce. However, ineffective control of the resource actions can produce undesirable situations such as oscillation between hiring and releasing, and amplified oscillation through the stages of the service processes. Effective combination of multiple feedback control schemes for different demand disturbance patterns can produce desirable policies of workforce resource actions. In this work, we apply control theoretic principles in managing workforce resource actions to see how the feedback control schemes can provide decision support that leads to reduction of resource costs, improvement of resource utilization and stability of workforce availability. ©2008 IEEE.