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Managing Workforce Training And Management For Economic Survival

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With the costs associated in maintaining a skilled-workforce shooting up, it is crucial for organizations to adapt to the changing environments and make better informed decisions in terms of workforce training and management for economic survival (Kapp, 1999). Managing workforces involve both short-term and long-term decisions to determine the most effective practices and policies to close gaps and meet future workforce needs. While long-term decisions deal with the overall composition of the workforce and the number of workers to hire or fire, short-term decisions involve assigning workers to tasks often with an objective like meeting demand or cross-training. The focus of this thesis is on short-term scheduling models to assign workers to departments/tasks.
Scheduling models, with certain exceptions, often fail to capture a realistic scenario within the mathematical model while assigning workers to tasks (Bruecker et al., 2015). Some of the key challenges faced by managers in real situations are worker heterogeneity, the effects of learning/forgetting and variation in demand. Both in production systems and service oriented industries, assuming that all workers are equally productive while there can be substantial differences in individual capabilities in the real world, could have a considerable effect on the realized performance of the production system. Boudreau (2003), while contrasting the views of Operations Management (OM) and Human Resources Management (HRM),

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