Question

Case study 10.3: 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.

Answer 1

1.

Workforce scheduling has become a very important tool or strategy by which organizations can actually manage the high labor cost that the organization incur. It is a process by which employees are managed, to make them more productive for the organization so that organization benefits from the labor and employee practices throughout. It has been widely accepted by organizations and the management who uses it effectively to reduce the labor cost and also ensure high productivity. There are some challenges that organizations or rather managers experience while implementing the strategy, which are as follows:

• Managing the budget assigned is a major problem because the Department of Labor has stringent guidelines regarding the pay and any violation may lead to legal consequences.

• As the schedules are unstable to quite some extent, employee may complain of unfair attitude towards them and this is done because of practices rotating shifts, unplanned emergency work, etc.

• Fatigue is another concern that managers experience because employee may complain a lot because of this.

• Bridging the gap in case of absence of employees is another challenge because almost everybody is assigned work and it is tough to assign extra work to another employee for nothing.

2.

Workforce scheduling techniques requires special knowledge and skills for implementation and execution. The main objective of workforce scheduling is to maximize resource and assign the work in the most optimal way possible. Smaller organizations can handle the tasks with other techniques as workforce scheduling may cost them high. Thus, large organization which have a large number of workforce to handle workforce scheduling is a helpful tool to manage workforce. Thus, it can be more beneficial for large organization.