Aggregate Planning with Learning Curve Productivity

Ebert, Ronald J.

doi:10.1287/mnsc.23.2.171

Cited by 101 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Holt et al's (1960) seminal manpower planning model and its linear hiring rules have inspired a long stream of research papers. For example, see Orrbeck et al (1968), Ebert (1976), Gaimon and Thompson (1984), and Khoshnevis and Wolfe (1986), all of which use a mathematical programming approach.…”

Section: Overview Of Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing Learning and Turnover in Employee Staffing

Gans

Zhou

2002

Operations Research

100

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We study the employee staffing problem in a service organization that uses employee service capacity to meet random, nonstationary service requirements. The employees experience learning and turnover on the job, and we develop a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model which explicitly represents the stochastic nature of these effects. Theoretical results show that the optimal hiring policy is of a state-dependent "hire-up-to" type, similar to an inventory "order-up-to" policy. For two important special cases, a myopic policy is optimal. We also test a linear programming (LP) based heuristic, which uses average learning and turnover behavior, in stationary environments. In most cases, the LP-based policy performs quite well, within 1% of optimality. When flexible capacity-in the form of overtime or outsourcing-is expensive or not available, however, explicit modeling of stochastic learning and turnover effects may improve performance significantly.

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Section: Overview Of Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing Learning and Turnover in Employee Staffing

Gans

Zhou

2002

Operations Research

100

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“…Holt's quadratic cost model is converted to a linear cost model in (Hanssmann and Hess 1960) and solved via linear programming. The Holt model is also extended in (Ebert 1976) with the inclusion of time varying productivity. Ebert solves this non-linear program using a search heuristic.…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

New Project Staffing for Outsourced Call Centers with Global Service Level Agreements

Robbins

Harrison

2011

Service Science

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e consider the issue of new project staffing in an outsourced call center required to meet a monthly Service Level Agreement (SLA). We present empirical analysis generated during a field study with a provider of outsourced call center services to illustrate the unique issues related to staffing a new project. Our work shows that during the start-up phase of a project agents experience significant improvements in productivity that reduce the staffing requirements over time. We also find that turnover, which is typically high in a call center environment, may be even higher for a project launch dominated by newly hired agents. These factors interact with the uncertainty of call volumes and talk time to create a difficult hiring challenge. We develop a model that finds the level of hiring with the lowest total expected cost of operation while meeting service level commitments.

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“…, f 9 are approximations of the "learning curve functions," as explained in Section 1. Considering the learning curve function (2) and using the approximation given by Ebert [13], we have…”

Section: Computational Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bin‐packing problem with concave costs of bin utilization

Chen

2006

Naval Research Logistics

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Abstract:We consider a generalized one-dimensional bin-packing model where the cost of a bin is a nondecreasing concave function of the utilization of the bin. Four popular heuristics from the literature of the classical bin-packing problem are studied: First Fit (FF), Best Fit (BF), First Fit Decreasing (FFD), and Best Fit Decreasing (BFD). We analyze their worst-case performances when they are applied to our model. The absolute worst-case performance ratio of FF and BF is shown to be exactly 2, and that of FFD and BFD is shown to be exactly 1.5. Computational experiments are also conducted to test the performance of these heuristics.

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Aggregate Planning with Learning Curve Productivity

Cited by 101 publications

References 6 publications

Managing Learning and Turnover in Employee Staffing

Managing Learning and Turnover in Employee Staffing

New Project Staffing for Outsourced Call Centers with Global Service Level Agreements

Bin‐packing problem with concave costs of bin utilization

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