Real-Time Labour Allocation in grocery stores: A simulation-based approach

Aligning staff with changing customer and store needs is key to store operations management. There is considerable research on personnel scheduling, but little on the common phenomenon of Real-Time Labour Allocation (RTLA), where mismatches between workforce supply and demand are addressed by alloca...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inDecision Support Systems Vol. 124; p. 113095
Main Authors Mou, Shandong, Robb, David J.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.09.2019
Elsevier Sequoia S.A
Subjects
Cross-training
Decision analysis
Employee benefits
Operations management
Real time
Real-time labour allocation
Retail operations
Retail stores
Scheduling
Simulation
Supermarkets
Workforce
Workforce flexibility
Retail operations
Workforce flexibility
Cross-training
Real-time labour allocation
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Summary:Aligning staff with changing customer and store needs is key to store operations management. There is considerable research on personnel scheduling, but little on the common phenomenon of Real-Time Labour Allocation (RTLA), where mismatches between workforce supply and demand are addressed by allocating potentially cross-trained employees in real time. Our interviews with retail practitioners confirm that RTLA decisions lack analytical justification. In view of this, we design a generalisable stylised Retail Store Simulator (RSS) and instantiate the RSS using data from a gourmet supermarket. Simulation results show substantial long-term benefits to store performance from RTLA – a potential 6.6% increase in market share compared with No-RTLA. We further discuss RTLA's benefits under various employee cross-training configurations, answering a question from the collaborating retailer – “given the benefits of RTLA, how should we manage workforce flexibility?” We conduct extensive “what-if” analysis and find that broadening employee skill range and deepening employee proficiency increase the benefits of RTLA. This research helps understand workforce management at the execution stage. •A generalisable stylised Retail Store Simulator is proposed.•Impacts of real-time labour allocation are explored in a case store.•The value of cross-training and its dimensions are discussed.
ISSN:0167-9236
1873-5797
DOI:10.1016/j.dss.2019.113095