Workforce & Service
3 optimization problems
How Do I Build Weekly Employee Patterns — Demand Met, Rest, Hours and Fairness All Holding Together?
The HR or operations manager of a 7-day 24-hour service (retail chain call center, hotel reception, security service, hospital cleaning) builds not individual shifts but **weekly patterns** for 100-500 employees: who works which days, in which shifts (morning/afternoon/night), with what days-off pattern — peak-hour demand covered, weekend and night load shared fairly. The intuitive plan bleeds from one of two ends: understaffed peaks (queue at the till, lost sales, abandoned calls) or overstaffed lulls (80-200 TRY/hour labour, roughly 30-60K TRY a month wasted on a 100-person operation). On top of that, contract breaches (45-hour weekly cap, 5 consecutive days, 7-10 nights per month) trigger payroll penalties and labour-law risk; without a written fairness metric, turnover climbs to 40-80% and every new hire costs 8-30K TRY in training. For a 200-person operation, annual payroll is in the 30-80M TRY range; a 10% improvement is a 3-8M TRY/year saving.
n Tasks + n People / Machines — Who Do I Assign To What So Total Cost or Time Is Minimum?
For service SMBs that start each week asking 'who should I put on what': engineering practices with 5-30 engineers, law offices distributing 20-80 files a week, facility-management firms with 10-50 field technicians, or hospitals matching surgeons to cases. Every person-task pair has a different real cost because skill, time, travel distance and personal preference mix together; the intuitive 'best person on the hardest job' rule cannot see those differences. Bad pairings show up as overtime, late deliveries and customer complaints by Friday. A systematic matching of the same team typically cuts total cost or time by 15-30%.
Which Technician to Which Customer, at What Time?
An HVAC service, elevator maintenance company, appliance service, ISP technician operator or agricultural machinery service with 5–50 field technicians faces a daily request list each morning: 30–150 customers seeking planned periodic maintenance, breakdown repair, or installation. The decision: which technician, which customer, in what order, at what time. Constraints to honor in parallel: customer time window (morning / afternoon / a specific slot), technician skill (HVAC brand A vs B, elevator type, internet infrastructure), travel time (20–90 minutes in-city), spare parts in the technician's van, urgent-job priority. Manual assignment is workable for 10–15 technicians; above that, the dispatch team spends 2–4 hours a day on the phone — slipped appointments, customer dissatisfaction, and idle technicians become routine.