讲座题目：Real-Time Labour Allocation in GroceryStores: a Simulation-Based Approach

时间：2019年3月20日中午12:30-14:00

地点：主教615会议室

主讲人：牟善栋博士

Abstract:

Retail store profitability relates in partto the alignment of staff with changing customer and store needs. While thereare many studies on workforce planning decisions producing personnel schedulesinadvance, research on the common phenomenon of Real-Time Labour Allocation(RTLA) where mismatches between labour demand and service at theexecutionstage are addressed by allocating cross-trained employees among departments isscant. Our interviews with retail practitioners confirm that RTLA decisionslack analytical justification. In view of this, we design a generalisablestylised Retail Store Simulator (RSS) and instantiate the RSS using data from agourmet supermarket. Simulation results show substantial long-term benefits tostore performance from RTLA – a potential 6.6% increase in market sharecompared with No-RTLA. We further discuss RTLA’s benefits under variousemployee cross-training configurations, answering a question from thecollaborating retailer – “given the benefits of RTLA, how should we manageworkforce flexibility?” We conduct extensive “what-if” analysis and find thatbroadening employee skill range and deepening employee proficiency increase thebenefits of RTLA. This research helps understand workforce management at theexecutionstage.

Bio:

Shandong Mou is a PhD student in the Graduate School ofManagement at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research interestsinclude retail operations and logistics engineering. His research has appearedinEuropean Journal of Operational Research,Computers &Industrial Engineering,Chinese Journal of Mechanical Engineering,InternationalJournal of Production Research, among others. He serves as an ad-hocreviewer forEuropean Journal of Operational ResearchandComputers& Operations Research.

牟善栋

新西兰奥克兰大学商学院应届博士研究生。研究兴趣为运营管理和物流工程。研究成果已发表在《European Journal of Operational Research》、《Computers& Industrial Engineering》、《Chinese Journal of MechanicalEngineering》、《International Journal of ProductionResearch》和《机械工程学报》等国内外期刊，担任《European Journal of OperationalResearch》和《Computers & OperationsResearch》审稿人。