Extended abstract — bringing science to the art of workforce management in service industries

It is estimated that today over 70% of the global labour is employed in non-manufacturing jobs, a major part of that being in the service industry - retail stores, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, contact centres, etc. There is widespread use of technology in many business practices of these organizations, but only some, e.g. 17% of retail stores, have automated workforce optimization and most still rely on manual methods or spreadsheets. This paper describes primarily a shift scheduling environment in the context of weekly tour scheduling.