Extended abstract — bringing science to the art of workforce management in service industries

Abstract

IT is estimated that today over 70% of the global labour is employed in non-manufacturing jobs [1], a major part of that being in the service industry — retail stores, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, contact centres [2], etc. There is widespread use of technology in many business practices of these organizations, but only some, e.g. 17% of retail stores [3], have automated workforce optimization and most still rely on manual methods or spreadsheets.