Convenience Store Staff Scheduling
Client: Towers Perrin, TeePee Convenience Stores
Team: Eric Mentz, Greg Meurer
Faculty: Dr. Richard Barr Year: 1995
Documents: Final report
Tee Pee is a United-States-based convenience store chain (renamed for confidentiality reasons) consisting of approximately 4000 stores. Tee Pee is in the process of developing a system for their individual store managers that would help them to adequately staff their stores based on customer flow and satisfaction.
The consultants at Towers Perrin formulated a manual model, which was developed into the Store Staffing Tool. We saw an opportunity to automate this model and develop an algorithm that would automatically assign employees to certain hours of the week, based on availability and competency. The resulting output of this algorithm not only shows the work schedule for the week; it also shows the staffing levels required, the total number of labor hours needed during the week, the overall labor cost of running that store for one week, and it highlights which employees are not being used adequately.Our program provides a good starting point for scheduling, and will save store managers both time and money. It will allow store managers to be able to better manage their resources so that staffing levels will be appropriate for the customer flow. This reduces both over and under staffing, and the number of overtime hours has been brought to zero.