Scheduling of flexible resources in professional service firms

Abstract

Flexibility is the ability of an organization to effectively cope with uncertainties and changes in the market by employing resources that can process different types of jobs. In today’s ever-changing business environment, driven by the challenges of quick response, increasing customization, shorter product life cycles, and intense competition, flexibility has become vital for both manufacturing and service operations to hedge these systems against uncertainty while controlling costs. Decision makers well understand the strategic significance of flexibility to compete effectively (Jones and Ostroy, 1984).However, these strategic decisions must be integrated with operational policies and resource usage decisions to fully realize the benefits of flexibility. At the strategic level, practitioners and researchers focus on the role of flexibility in handling uncertainties, translating flexibility requirements into capacity and performance objectives. This area has been a popular research field due to the emergence of related flexible manufacturing technologies (e.g., Fine and Freund, 1990; Jordan and Graves, 1995;Mieghem, 1998). Operational level issues, on the other hand, deal with designing specific methods for deployment of flexibility. Given the available level of flexibility in resources, the decision maker faces the problem of effectively allocating these flexible resources to various operations in order to achieve the strategic goals. In this chapter we investigate operational policies for deployment of flexible resources in professional service firms such as consulting, legal, or training firms. In particular, the work is motivated by resource assignment decisions within the workplace learning industry.