This document discusses workshift scheduling to manage staffing capacity and demand. Workshift scheduling involves forecasting future demand, determining required staff levels, scheduling shifts, and assigning staff to shifts while considering preferences and constraints. An example is provided of scheduling nurses for an emergency room across seven shifts planned to meet daily minimum requirements, while ensuring each nurse gets two consecutive days off per week as required. Integer linear programming and Excel solver can be used to optimize the nurse schedule to meet all constraints with the minimum number of nurses.

1. Managing Capacity and Demand

2. Workshift scheduling
 Workshift scheduling is a well recognised method
for managing and resolving staffing problems of
such organisations which need to manage multiple
staffs and shifts
 Main objective of Workshift scheduling is to maintain
capacity and demand adequately through careful
mathematical calculations making it a systematic
method of dealing with staffing problems

3. Steps in workshift scheduling
1. Forecast demand: Future demand is forecasted through
various techniques like past observation, analysis of the
situation & data management and many more such
techniques.
 For Scheduling of staff the forecasted demand could be done
in terms of monthly, weekly, daily and hourly depending on
the need of your organisation.

4. 2. Convert to worker requirement: On the basis
of forecasted demand, the number of workers that will be
required is determined (in terms of nurse bed ratio, patient doctor
ratio, based on time-motion study etc.).
While determining number of workers required, a quality
statement is directly or indirectly implied.
Steps in workshift scheduling

5. Strategies for managing
capacity
3. Schedule shift: Shifts or tours of employees
are scheduled. Shift or tours represent various
time of start and end time of work.

6. Strategies for managing
capacity
4. Assign workers to shifts: Assigning workers to shifts
need careful attention specially in hospitals and other
industries that operate 24 * 7
 Some shifts may be more preferable than the
others. For eg. Day shift over night shift

7. Strategies for managing
capacity
 An emergency room is to be operated 24*7, 7 days a week.
The day is divided into 3 shifts of 8 hour each. Suppose,
minimum nurses required to staff the emergency room
during day shift across the week is
Day Sun Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Sat
Nurses 3 6 5 6 5 5 5

8. Schedule Matrix
 In the hospital, nurses work 5 days a week and
are entitled to 2 consecutive days off each
week.

9. Strategies for managing
capacity
 The emergency room incharge is interested in developing a shift
schedule that minimize the number of nurses required to staff the
emergency room
 In the hospital, nurses work 5 days a week and are entitled to 2
consecutive days off each week.
Schedule matrix, x = day off
Nurse Su M Tu W Th F Sa
1 … … x x x x x
2
.
.
.
.
.
n
Required 3 6 5 6 5 5 5

10.  We put these figures into excel sheet and draw one table for
getting optimal number of nurses
 There could be multiple optimal solutions for such problems

11. Strategies for managing
capacity
 The problem that emergency incharge is
looking at it is of determining the minimum
number of nurses that need to assigned to
each of seven possible tours or shifts where
each tour or shift consists of 5 working day
and 2 consecutive days off.
 Each of these tours will start on a different
day of the week and last for 5 consecutive
days.

12. we have 2 constraints:
 Now it is the task of operations
manager to assign optimum number of
nurses in the shift at all particular days
so that on any day required number of
nurses should not be less than the
minimum number needed for that day
as mentioned in the previous data
First is that every nurse should get 2 days
of consecutive leaves in a week. It can be

13. Strategies for managing
capacity
 Let
 X = number of nurses assigned to tour i, where day i begins
2 consecutive days off (for example, nurse assigned to tour 1
has Sunday and Monday Off)
 Objective function is
 Minimize X1 + X2 + X3 + X4 + X5 + X6 + X7

14. Strategies for managing
capacity
 For getting the required answer for emergency department
incharge, problem can be solved as integer linear
programming (ILP) model using solver feature in Microsoft
Excel
 Use Excel

15.  Now we assign the nurse schedule for
the entire week

18. Practice Question
 Telephone reservation department for a hotel has
daily shift requirement as shown in table below.
Prepare a weekly workshift schedule with two
consecutive days off. Use solver.
Days Sun Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Sat
Minimum
Workers
4 8 8 7 7 6 5

19. Thank You