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Flexitime Allows Workers To Choose His/her Starting And Stopping Times Of ...

Flexitime allows workers to choose his/her starting and stopping times of work, as long as he/she works in the \core hours", usually 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Number and pattern of allowable daily shifts - there may be day, evening and night
shifts, with alternative start-end times and break periods allowed.

Work rules concerning the days on/off patterns for the workforce - The number of days should be consecutive or not, rotating shifts may be allowed or not etc.
The maximum workstretch (i.e. the number of consecutive work days) allowed
Workforce attributes - There may be different skills of workers, part-time workers may be considered.

Taking into consideration all of these factors above, the task is then to find a feasible and economically sound schedule that meets the needs of the service (Gunes, 1999).

In addition to these complicating factors, the main difficulty of the workforce scheduling problem is that it deals with human beings (Gunes, 1999). So the cost of a schedule is far more than the resulting total wage burden on the company (Gunes, 1999), and as can be seen in the aviation industry, the costs of scheduling can be viewed as far broader and long term than simple notions of paying workforce wages. Attrition, levels of sickness and absence, all are factors which present a cost to the organisation. Similarly, other costs are related to accidents, efficiency, customer satisfaction, litigation and responses to all of these. Gunes (1999) also adds that the training costs, suggests that hiring and firing, overtime costs, health and safety factors should also be taken into account while preparing work schedules.
The characteristics of a work schedule that should be considered while making the scheduling decision are displayed in Table 2.

Table 2: Characteristics of a work schedule (from Gunes, 1999).
Coverage: The existence of minimum required number of workers for each time period.
Quality: Measure of the desirability of the schedule for the worker who will work it.
Stability: Measure of the extent to which the workers know their future days off and on duty.
Flexibility: The ability to handle changes, such as from passing from full time to part time, and emergence of special requirements of workers.
Fairness: The measure of extent that each worker is affected same by the schedule, in terms of undesirable shifts etc.

Gunes (1999) thus demonstrates that not all feasible schedules can be judged as best solutions for the workforce scheduling problem. In particular, the notions of flexibility and quality may be particularly problematic for the aviation industry.


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