Call-Center Labor Cross-Training: It’s a Small World After All

Iravani, Seyed M. R.; Kolfal, Bora; Oyen, Mark P. Van

doi:10.1287/mnsc.1060.0621

Cited by 85 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…To answer this question, the academic community started to develop flexibility design indices, following the original index developed in Jordan and Graves (1995), which we will refer to as the JG index. Other well-known indices include the Structural Flexibility index in Iravani et al (2005), WS-APL index in Iravani et al (2007), gMeasure in Graves and Tomlin (2003), and the Expansion index in Chou et al (2008). We refer the readers to , for a complete description of these indices.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Worst-Case Analysis of Process Flexibility Designs

Simchi‐Levi

Wei

2015

Operations Research

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Authors are encouraged to submit new papers to INFORMS journals by means of a style file template, which includes the journal title. However, use of a template does not certify that the paper has been accepted for publication in the named journal. INFORMS journal templates are for the exclusive purpose of submitting to an INFORMS journal and should not be used to distribute the papers in print or online or to submit the papers to another publication. Theoretical studies of process flexibility designs have mostly focused on expected sales. In this paper, Worstwe take a different approach by studying process flexibility designs from the worst-case point of view. To study the worst-case performances, we introduce the plant cover indices (PCIs), defined by bottlenecks in flexibility designs containing a fixed number of products. We prove that given a flexibility design, a general class of worst-case performance measures can be expressed as functions of the design's PCIs and the given uncertainty set. This result has several major implications. First, it suggests a method to compare the worstcase performances of different flexibility designs without the need to know the specifics of the uncertainty sets. Second, we prove that under symmetric uncertainty sets and a large class of worst-case performance measures, the long-chain, a celebrated sparse design, is superior to a large class of sparse flexibility designs including any design that has a degree of two on each of its product nodes. Third, we show that under stochastic demand, the classical Jordan and Graves (JG) index can be expressed as a function of the PCIs.Furthermore, the PCIs motivate a modified JG index that is shown to be more effective in our numerical study. Finally, the PCIs lead to a heuristic for finding sparse flexibility designs that perform well under expected sales and have lower risk measures in our computational study.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Worst-Case Analysis of Process Flexibility Designs

Simchi‐Levi

Wei

2015

Operations Research

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“…Hopp et al (2004) and Iravani et al (2007) also study effective workforce cross-training structures. In vehicle routing, there is research in creating routes with balanced daily schedules [Levy and Bodin (1988)] and balanced route lengths [Jozefowiez et al (2007)].…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Workforce Management in Periodic Delivery Operations

Smilowitz

Nowak

Jiang

2013

Transportation Science

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Service quality and driver efficiency in the delivery industry may be enhanced by increasing the regularity with which a driver visits the same set of customers. However, effectively managing a workforce of drivers may increase travel distance, a traditional metric of the vehicle routing problem (VRP). This paper evaluates the effect that workforce management has on routing costs, providing insight for managerial decision making. The analysis is presented in the context of the period vehicle routing problem (PVRP), an extension of the VRP with vehicle routes constructed to service customers according to preset visit frequencies over an established period of time. We develop models to apply workforce management principles. We show that multi-objective PVRP models can achieve a balance between workforce management and travel distance goals, through a computational study with standard PVRP test cases and real-world delivery data. With the proper parameters in place, workforce management principles may be successfully applied without sacrificing other operational objectives.

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“…Call center agents are crosstrained to handle various types of calls, with the goal being to improve call handling times and reduce call queues (Ahghari & Balcioglu, 2009;Iravani & Van Oyen, 2007). Cross-training, product training, and language training, however, cannot fully account for the knowledge the call center agents gain on the job.…”

Section: Promoting Collaborative Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With increasing interest in call center communication studies over the past few years, there has been important research on how NNS agents communicate with NS callers and how the agents themselves function within outsourced call centers (Forey & Lockwood, 2007;Iravani & Van Oyen, 2007;Pal & Buzzanell, 2008). NNS agents are Control, Communication, and Knowledge-Building in Asian Call Centers 66 did not effectively develop or tap-into the knowledge of the call center agents (Herndl and Lacona 2007;Spinuzzi 2003Spinuzzi , 2005.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%