Abstracts Volume 8 Number 4

The competitiveness of retail stores depends heavily on the ability to handle the challenges of reducing control costs and increasing customer service levels. One element that affects cost significantly is labour costs. This paper addresses proposing a procedure of finding the optimal solutions of personnel planning, especially by making use of the actual Point of Sales (POS) data and considering several frequency patterns of customers entering a store. First, a simulation model of the payment process is designed to establish the conditions for an integer programming (IP) model. Second, this study proposes the IP model to find the initial optimal patterns of salesclerk allocation; that is, the allocation pattern is optimal at each interval. Finally, the simulation model is used to examine the service level. With the assistance of the simulation result, the optimal solution can be obtained to satisfy a predefined service level by repeating the simulation model. 14 refs. (Received in February 2009, accepted in June 2009. This paper was with the author 1 month for 1 revision.)