Question

Using Workforce Scheduling to Lower Labour Costs

1. Discuss the challenges the organisations have in relation to workforce scheduling.

2. Explain why workforce scheduling technology is particularly suitable to large organisations.

3. Explain how organisations can use operations planning to achieve their organisational objectives.

As a consequence of the credit crunch and the downturn in many economies, companies are finding it increasingly difficult to increase prices to consumers. This is a problem as many firms are experiencing increased costs in resources such as raw materials and energy. However, in the USA businesses have been able to demand that fewer employees do more work for less pay. Industrial output has continued to increase, even as employers have laid off workers. Companies, including retail giant Wal-Mart, are using new flexible scheduling technology to ensure fewer employees work at times when store customer traffic is low. Accordingly, labour costs, which account for about 70% of US corporate costs, have so far remained in check, in stark contrast to escalating wage inflation in countries such as Vietnam and China.

Answer 1

Answer:1

Using Workforce Scheduling to Lower Labour Costs

The challenges the organizations have in relation to workforce scheduling are as below

• Flexibility issue in labor: The key challenge for the organization to explore flexibility of the labors, so that they can ask the labors to work as per the effective slot for the organization, so that the organization does not lose business and achieve high sale. But labors do not support such approach. They want a standard working time for them. Legal clauses also support for standard working time.
• Skill/Competency issues of labor: The skill/competency level of labor is not appropriate that they can assign single labor for multiple tasks. Thus they need to keep different labors based on skill/ competency levels.
• Non-availability of labor for short time period: The labors are not available for short time period; they need to be assigned for full day work, as per legal rules.
• Legal foundations for labors: The organization faces many challenges due to legal boundations/limitation for the labors. Thus management of legal clauses is a key challenge for the organization.
• Union support for labors: Union makes it worse for the organization and do not let the organization for effective utilization of labors.

Thus all the above key challenges does not let the organization to reduce the labor costs and explore effective utilization of labor for organization goal and achieve cost reduction.

Answer :2.

Workforce scheduling technology is particularly suitable to large organizations because it facilitates following benefits to the organization as below

• Effective assignment of labor to the work/task.
• Helps in achieving optimum production with available resources.
• This works on optimization approach for the organization.
• Helps to have lowest possible cost investment for the organization. Thus results in cost saving.
• It develops the efficiency in the organization by efficient use of available resources.

Answer 3: Organizations can use operations planning to achieve their organizational objectives as below

• Operation planning helps for consider the available resources for the organization.
• Operation planning helps in effective use of the organizational tools, resources, processes and delivers better / optimized result for the organization.
• The planning helps in structured production approach and ensures that everything is available to support the production.
• The organization planning performs to manage the objective properly and ensure that they have sufficient control system to support the achievement of organization objectives.