Competence allocation planning robust to unexpected staff absenteeism

Abstract

The object of planning man-power needs (labor demand), as part of employment planning, is to define the competence profiles of the personnel and other individuals employed in a company. In particular, this involves defining the requirements regarding employees’ knowledge, skills, abilities and behavior, determining the number of workers needed for various positions, and the scope of work that employees in each position have to perform. The quality of employment plans obtained in this process depends on the robustness of the production process to disruptions caused by unexpected events such as employee absences, machine failures, accidents at work, etc. To deal with these uncertainties, organizations must either hire a properly prepared staff of competent workers (with a certain redundancy of competences), or introduce on-line changes to the existing task schedule that will mitigate the effects of the disruptions. In this study, we consider the first of the above-mentioned measures, in which, by anticipating possible disruptions, an organization builds a staff of employees with specific competences, robust to a selected set of disruptions. It should be noted that planning decisions regarding the allocation of production tasks (which require specific employee competences) to resources (employees with given competences) are made in dynamically changing organizational settings [7], which involve frequent changes in the scope and structure of objectives, tasks and resources. Examples of such changes include employee absenteeism (sick leaves, accidents, maternity leaves, etc.), changes in the number of jobs, staff mobility (frequent employment changes), etc. Most of them are random and cannot be anticipated well in advance. Such events are henceforth referred to as disruptions [6, 20]. If a disruption caused by an employee’s absence results in a so-called competence gap, it is usually too late to bridge the gap by introducing appropriate changes (training, employment, outsourcing, etc.). While the existing literature describes Eryk SzwArc Grzegorz BocEwicz zbigniew BAnASzAk Jarosław wikArEk