Real-Time Labour Allocation in Grocery Stores : A Simulation-based Approach

Aligning staff with changing customer and store needs is key to store operations management. There is considerable research on personnel scheduling, but little on the common phenomenon of Real-Time Labour Allocation (RTLA), where mismatches between workforce supply and demand are addressed by allocating potentially cross-trained employees in real time. Our interviews with retail practitioners confirm that RTLA decisions lack analytical justification. In view of this, we design a generalisable stylised Retail Store Simulator (RSS) and instantiate the RSS using data from a gourmet supermarket. Simulation results show substantial long-term benefits to store performance from RTLA – a potential 6.6% increase in market share compared with No-RTLA. We further discuss RTLA's benefits under various employee cross-training configurations, answering a question from the collaborating retailer – “given the benefits of RTLA, how should we manage workforce flexibility?” We conduct extensive “what-if” analysis and find that broadening employee skill range and deepening employee proficiency increase the benefits of RTLA. This research helps understand workforce management at the execution stage. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2019.113095