Corporate manpower planning

In this paper the necessity of corporate manpower planning is discussed and the growing interest in it within many organizations. In particular medium and long term forecasting in rather large and structured organizations are explained and the need for tools to get a survey of the evolution of their personnel strength. These tools should help management and staff-members of a planning or personnel department to design alternative policies concerning promotions, recruitments, etc.We will present a planning method which satisfies these requirements. The interactive manpower planning system FORMASY presents forecasts concerning the evolution of the personnel strength and makes it possible to assess the impacts of alternative policies. This planning system is based on a Markov model and is being used on a general purpose computer in several Dutch organizations, both industrial and governmental.FORMASY has proved its value for practical manpower planning which will be explained by means of a case-study with the Royal Dutch Airforce.     

Making demography relevant: The Canadian baby boom

The paper presents a model for teaching demography used at the University of Waterloo which requires student projects. Three projects are described in some detail. They are analyses of unemployment rates, future housing requirements in the Province of Ontario, and the need to modify the normal retirement age of 65 used in the Canada/Quebec Pension Plan.     

Cohort Analysis Technique for Long-Term Manpower Planning: the Case of a Hong Kong Tertiary Institution

This paper considers the problem of long-term manpower planning on the number of teaching staff for the case of a tertiary institution—the City Polytechnic of Hong Kong (CPHK). Due to the high turnover experienced in recent years, it is found necessary to study the wastage pattern of staff, defined as the number of new appointees who have left CPHK employment, rather than simply addressing just the issue of strength (namely number in post). A cohort analysis technique is therefore applied to characterize statistically the wastage rate as related to the length of service of individual cohorts of staff, being groups of newcomers joining CPHK in the same periods of time. This results in a log-normal model, showing a significant cohort specific effect on the wastage behaviour. Extending this cohort analysis technique, together with double exponential smoothing forecasts, to future retention rates (1 — cumulative wastage rates), a long-term planning model is constructed to study the relation between expected yearly recruitment levels and the target manpower requirements for the future five-year planning horizon. While the idea and model developed here are generally applicable, the present computational results provide valuable decision supports for an actual case study, for CPHK in particular.     

The Prospect Award 1981: A Manpower Planning Model for Mobile Repairmen

The country's largest vending machine operators and distributors were faced with the problem of evaluating manpower requirements and structure for the repair and maintenance work force, and of deciding where additions to this force should be located. This paper describes the formulation and application of a solution to the problem which has had beneficial effects far beyond the scope originally envisaged.The work force concerned operates a breakdown repair service which requires random journeys within each individual's prescribed area. The developed model evaluates the work content, and thus manpower requirements, of a region based on the number of machines, the breakdown rates, the repair times and the journey time. The travel component is automatically adjusted for growth in the work force.Analysis of the model's sensitivity to the key factors and the development of the relationship between utilisation and service level have enabled the company to improve service performance by 15% while also achieving a 67% increase in productivity.     

Personnel Recruitment Policies and Long-Term Production Planning

Any organization or industry operating in a market where there is unmet demand will be under considerable pressure to meet the demand as quickly as possible. This short-term objective can be met by rapidly expanding productive capacity in terms of both plant or other equipment and also manpower. If the commodity in demand is durable—e.g. housing, cars, computers—then when the initial requirement is met, further output is for replacement purposes. Production during the expansion phase, planned to eliminate the backlog of demand may be much greater than that needed for the next phase, meeting recurrent replacement demand. If capacity is allowed to run down, a later increase in demand will possibly find the organization with too little capacity. There follows a potentially continuing cycle of under- and over-production. Since manpower comprises a significant part of the capacity, this creates a possible cycle of under- and over-employment.Mathematical models of manpower systems can be adapted to investigate the consequences of controlling recruitment policies over fairly long periods of time. If costs can be ascribed to both under- and over-production it is possible to combine the manpower models with mathematical programming techniques to produce optimal longterm recruitment policies.The possible development of the telephone network in the Republic of Ireland is used as an illustrative example. Here it has already been established by government operational research scientists that meeting the original target number of installations for the early 1980's would require impossibly large levels of recruitment immediately. Our model shows that, if the target were achieved, an intolerably large proportion of the workforce would be redundant in a few years time. We use a linear programming model to illustrate viable policies trading off present delays in satisfying demand against future overmanning.     

Profile‐based push models in manpower planning

A methodology is presented to deal with heterogeneity due to observable variables in modeling personnel systems. For a manpower system, a model based on personnel profiles is introduced. The proposed algorithm concerns an analysis of the evolution of personnel profiles under time‐discrete Markov assumptions. In this way, based on an historical personnel database, the estimation of transition probabilities of profiles as well as the computation of forecasts on the evolution of the manpower system can be found. Based on the presented procedure, a policy supporting software package has been developed for the Belgian Federal Government (research project financed by Federaal Wetenschapsbeleid). Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Determination of Total Research Effort

The reasons for endeavouring to estimate the appropriate total research expenditure in a manufacturing industry are outlined. Three techniques are discussed using an analytical, a comparative and a synthetic approach respectively. It is pointed out that the guidance given by these three techniques differs substantially in particular situations and that more studies are needed as to the relative value of the three solutions. It is suggested that an individual company should be spending about one-fifth of its future capital requirements on R. & D. The R. & D. expenditure of the U.K. should be about 4 per cent of the gross national product.     

On the Stochastic Theory of Compartments: The General Time-dependent Two-compartment Reversible System with an Application to Manpower Planning

In this paper a general time-dependent stochastic model for the analysis of the two-compartment reversible system with non-homogeneous Poisson inputs and arbitrary residence times in each of the compartments is presented. The transition probabilities are suitably modified in order to be useful for estimation purposes of the parameters of the model. Various results are derived in terms of the distributions of the residence times only and are expressed in the form of convolution integrals which are readily evaluated by means of known computational algorithms. Finally, the theoretical results are applied to examples from the literature on manpower planning and some practical implications for the personnel and labour fields are considered.     

A Bivariate Model for Markov Manpower Planning Systems

Markov models are being extensively used for analysis of manpower planning systems. Most of these models concentrate either on estimating the gradewise distribution of future manpower structure, given the existing structure and promotion policies, or on deriving policies towards promotion, given the required future structure. However, in many large organizations, agreements between employee unions and management result in the framing of policies towards promotion based either on seniority (length of service in the grade) or on performance (as in the case of ‘high fliers’). In this paper these two criteria are considered in a bivariate distribution framework. The transition probabilities for promotion obtained from the Markov model are further translated into required seniority and performance rating. The procedure is illustrated through an example.     

Defence Manpower Studies<Superscript>†</Superscript>

The Defence Manpower Studies Unit (DMSU) has been created to co-ordinate and develop manpower planning and research for the Armed Forces. Some of its objectives and modes of operation are described.An important characteristic of the Unit is that it seeks to be both an operational research unit and an integral part of management. The arguments for this dual role are based on experience and particularly on the experience of the Naval Manpower Department. The relevant history of this Department is described, and examples of its tasks given.The Armed Forces, taken together, absorb a substantial part of the national manpower resources at the recruiting ages, but also contribute to national trained manpower. The DMSU, therefore, is paying considerable attention to macro-scale aspects. Some of the work of the new Unit is relevant to the work of other government departments, universities, and industry. Examples are given.     

Modelling heterogeneity in a manpower system: a review

Manpower planning is an essential methodology for business and industry; it allows managers to make more efficient use of human resources. However, human behaviour is highly variable and it is therefore essential for manpower planning that population heterogeneity is successfully modelled. In this paper we review methods of incorporating population heterogeneity into manpower modelling. The analysis of differentials in a manpower system is emphasized since they are a source of aggregation error in stochastic models. Two strategies have been stressed, the use of observable sources of heterogeneity as they affect wastage, and the latent sources which cannot be identified precisely but are known to affect the key parameters of most models. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Markovian Goal Programming Approach to Aggregate Manpower Planning

The combination of a manpower supply model (a Markov type model based on historical probabilities of losses, promotions and gains) and goal programming with preemptive priorities provides a useful tool for developing a future year manpower plan under conflicting socio-econo-organizational objectives. Successful utilization requires a close management involvement in adjusting probabilities and specifying goals, priorities and impending policy changes. Such an approach is presented in this paper and illustrated by means of an industrial case study example. The presentation is kept simple, yet detailed and unified, so that is is easily understood by practitioners and students of operational research/management science.     

Three Value Estimates of Input Variables and Health Manpower Projections

The introduction of variability and stochastic processes in health manpower projections may help health planners cope with the inherent problem of uncertainty in the future. However, limited data and the complex nature of health manpower make it very difficult or even impossible to estimate the probability distribution of input variables. In this paper, two statistical methods are discussed and compared for approximating a probability distribution based on imperfect data. The common feature of the two methods is that they use minimum, maximum, and most likely values, which can be estimated by people with little knowledge of statistics and probability. In addition, the methods can be used to analyse variables with a symmetrical as well as non-symmetrical probability distribution. An example is provided of the application of the methods to health manpower projections in China.     

Stochastic Programming Applied to Human Resource Planning

This paper shows how state space models for human resource planning may be extended from linear and goal-programming formulations to cover the case where manpower demands and available resources for future periods are not known with certainty. Under reasonable assumptions, the problem can be treated as a multi-period stochastic program with simple recourse. Normal and Beta probability distributions are fitted to the right hand sides, and the equivalent determinstic programme solved using convex separable programming. An application of this methodology to a military human resource planning problem is described. Solution times for the stochastic model compare favourably with those for a goal-programming model of the same human resource system.     

An extended and tractable approach on the convergence problem of the mixed push-pull manpower model

In this paper, the asymptotic behavior of the time-homogeneous mixed push-pull manpower model is studied under the assumption that the desired stock vector and the recruitment policy are fixed over time. In the mixed push-pull manpower model, the internal mobility of a personnel system can be regulated by both pull and push transitions. Based on those characteristics, we express and examine the dynamics of the personnel system by formulating the mixed push-pull manpower model by means of particular transition matrices, which we demonstrate to have interesting properties. We show that under certain conditions the stock vector converges. An explicit analytical form for this limiting personnel stock vector is found.     

The dynamics of the UK chemical plant investment cycle

Orders for new chemical plant (sanctions) and investment in chemical plant both show marked business cycle like variations. Amongst the effects of the UK cycle on the Chemical Industry are variations in: new plant additions, requirements for capital expenditure finance and capital utilization. As far as the UK Process Plant Contractors and Process Plant Manufacturers are concerned, the cycle is reflected in a varying work-load arising from the UK Chemical Industry together with varying manpower requirements and profitability.The project described in this paper involved the construction of both System Dynamics and Control Systems models of the Investment Cycle as a guide to strategic planning for the industries affected by it.The implications of the results from both types of model for corporate and strategic planning in the industries concerned are discussed.     

A system dynamics model of the semiconductor industry development in Taiwan

Taiwan has become the fourth largest semiconductor manufacturer worldwide within only 25 years. Taiwan’s success in developing its semiconductor industry has been widely recognized. Building a semiconductor industry in a developing country is costly, risky, and requires long-term accumulations of capital, technology, human resources, and production capacity. The development process depends on environmental interactions, which should be studied in an integrated and holistic manner. Using system dynamics methodology, this study analyses the development experience of the Taiwanese semiconductor industry, in order to provide better insight into the long-term industrial development process. The study also simulates the proposed model in one historical setting and two future scenarios. Implications for the development of the semiconductor industry in Taiwan and other Asian countries are discussed.     

Hidden heterogeneity in manpower systems: A Markov-switching model approach

In modeling manpower systems, it is of crucial importance to deal with heterogeneity. Until recently, manpower models are dealing with heterogeneity due to observable sources, neglecting heterogeneity due to latent sources. In this paper a two-step procedure is introduced. In the first step personnel groups homogeneous with respect to the transition probabilities are determined in a classical way by taking into account the observable sources of heterogeneity. In the second step heterogeneity caused by latent sources is handled. A multinomial Markov-switching manpower model is introduced that deals with heterogeneity due to latent sources for the internal flows as well as for the wastage flows. The model incorporates the mover-stayer principle. A re-estimation algorithm is presented to estimate the parameters of the Markov-switching manpower model. The switching approach offers a methodology to build a Markov model with personnel groups as states that are more homogeneous, and therefore can contribute to a better validity of the manpower model.     

Worker deployment in dual resource constrained systems with a task-type factor

This paper investigates worker learning and forgetting phenomenon in a dual resource constrained system (DRC) setting. Worker learning and forgetting in two and three stage DRC systems are modeled according to the dual-phase learning and forgetting model (DPLFM), which is based on the theory that a task has separate cognitive and motor requirements. Results show that the task-type (with respect to its learning rate and proportion of cognitive and motor requirements) affects the performance of training and deployment policies in DRC systems, and as such it should be included in future DRC research.