Interactive workforce management on a PC: An industry-university partnership

A large multinational corporation approached the business school to solve a crew selection problem. Given a workforce of more than 300 regular employees with different levels of qualifications and a pool of temporary employees, the problem was to assign an appropriate crew to 150 different jobs over a planning horizon of one year. Initial skepticism of product managers of the company ranged from ‘going to be another academic exercise’ to ‘if you solve it, we will switch the lights on in this suburban area!’. A user-friendly interactive scheduling system, integrating the commercial software LOTUS 1-2-3, LINDO, and dBASE II Plus was successful in convincing the managers of the power of marriage of information systems and mathematical programming. The experiment also served as a starting point for an ongoing relationship between the university and the corporation.