In WFM Planning, capacity planning does not end at finding per interval FTE requirement. The next and harder task is to figure out the optimum number of heads and the optimum schedule shells. Please check out my latest Shiny App that can generate both the minimum number of agents and the associated schedule per agent for your desired combinations of FTE’s per interval, shift length, number of weekly working days per agent as well as the minimum staffing efficiency. The app works with default per interval FTE’s data but feel free to try with your own (make sure the format is the same as the default one).

The algorithm linearly searches for the optimum days of the week and shift starts combination per agent starting with the first agent. It does so by calculating the efficiency of staffing for every combination and adds the combination that achieves the best efficiency to the list of shift shells. The loop continues until the desired staffing efficiency is achieved or adding more agents does not improve the efficiency any more. Like you would expect, linear search is a very slow algorithm even more so on R. It takes up to 10 mins of waiting to generate the output for 1 week hourly FTE data if the minimum efficiency is anything higher than 70%. If you don’t have much such time, consider trying with much lower efficiency 🙂

I will appreciate suggestions of any faster algorithm that can be applied.

Link to the app: https://tesfahunboshe.shinyapps.io/CP2HP/

Source Code: https://github.com/tesfahunboshe/ResourcePlannint2HiringPLan-WFM

Author: Tesfahun Tegene Boshe