Employment Of Temporary Workers And Use Of Overtime To Achieve Volume Flexibility Using Master Production Scheduling: Monetary And Social Implications

Flexibility and in particular volume flexibility is an important topic for industrial manufacturing companies. In this context, the harmonization of the available and required capacity is a central task, especially with increasing fluctuations in customer demand. In classical approaches, this is considered only by the use of additional capacities and there are only a few approaches that combine aspects of personnel planning with production planning. Therefore, this article presents a linear optimization model for master production scheduling that includes aspects of personnel requirements planning. It is used to investigate different strategies for the use of overtime and temporary workers in order to achieve different levels of volume flexibility. With regard to the monetary and social impacts, the results indicate that overtime has a stronger influence to achieve volume flexibility than the use of temporary workers. However, both are affected by substantial deficits in human working conditions. But the results also imply a promising potential for improving the social aspects without a significant increase in costs.