IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/ormnsc/v20y1973i4-part-iip708-720.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Sure Staf: A Computerized Staff Scheduling System for Telephone Business Offices

Author

Listed:
  • J. G. Church

    (Bell Canada, Montreal)

Abstract

Scheduling of staff between answering incoming calls and processing paper-work has been a continual problem in telephone company Business Offices. A staff scheduling system has been developed and implemented in Bell Canada on a trial basis. Incoming call load data are recorded automatically and are entered daily into a time share computer terminal. The next day's forecast, by half hour, is made by a cyclic exponential smoothing routine and the number of servers required to take calls is calculated using a queueing model of the Business Office. A schedule of call answering periods for the available staff to match the requirements is made using a heuristic algorithm. Managers are able to choose their objective on the accessibility of the office to incoming customer calls and the staff can organize their work day without unplanned interruptions.

Suggested Citation

  • J. G. Church, 1973. "Sure Staf: A Computerized Staff Scheduling System for Telephone Business Offices," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 20(4-Part-II), pages 708-720, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:20:y:1973:i:4-part-ii:p:708-720
    DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.20.4.708
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.20.4.708
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/mnsc.20.4.708?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dietz, Dennis C., 2011. "Practical scheduling for call center operations," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 39(5), pages 550-557, October.
    2. Jaime Miranda & Pablo A. Rey & Antoine Sauré & Richard Weber, 2018. "Metro Uses a Simulation-Optimization Approach to Improve Fare-Collection Shift Scheduling," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 48(6), pages 529-542, November.
    3. Ernst, A. T. & Jiang, H. & Krishnamoorthy, M. & Sier, D., 2004. "Staff scheduling and rostering: A review of applications, methods and models," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 153(1), pages 3-27, February.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:20:y:1973:i:4-part-ii:p:708-720. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.