Category: Chapter 15

Posts related to Chapter 15

OM in the News: Oregon’s Basketball Scheduling Nightmare

operations management and NCAA and basketballWhen the University of Oregon announced last summer that it was joining the Big Ten conference, it discovered that its team would spend more time this season up in the air than actually playing basketball. Since their season began in November, the Ducks have crisscrossed the country so frequently that the total distance they’ve traveled this season amounts to 26,700 miles, the equivalent of traveling the entire circumference of planet Earth.

Oregon is by no means the only team racking up air miles this season, reports The Wall Street Journal (March 15-16, 2025). The most recent wave of conference realignment has stretched the bounds of geographic imagination in college sports, sending schools like California and Stanford to the Atlantic Coast Conference and plunking UCF (in Orlando)  in the Big 12, traditionally based in the Great Plains.

The Big Ten did its best to design a schedule that mitigated the impact on West Coast teams. The conference tried to avoid scheduling away games when players would be taking final exams and sequenced opponents so that traveling teams could play two games on a single road trip. “The scheduling of it,” said the Big Ten CEO, “is a sport in itself.”

Doing this in practice, however, often meant Oregon was forced to spend several days away from campus. When the Ducks made their first cross-country trip to play Ohio State and Penn State in January, the team spent 6 days and 5 nights on the road. More troubling than the flying was the amount of time-zone hopping the team was forced into, which included two road trips to the eastern time zone and two more to the central. Internal clocks are most thrown off by eastward travel of 3-5 hours, which can negatively affect reaction time, concentration and athletic performance.

That’s not the only reason that Oregon’s road trips are more disruptive. In the Pac-12, league games only took place on Thursdays and Sundays. The Big Ten plays every night of the week. To make all the travel work with academics, every player at Oregon had enroll in online classes this term—the first time that’s happened.

The graphic below shows intraconference away game travel for former Pac-12 teams. 2023-24 is on the left and 2024-25 is on the right.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. How can OM help with this problem?
  2. What about other college sports?

OM in the News: Operations Decisions at Newark International

On the Friday before Christmas, United Air Flight 1080 from Newark to San Jose, Costa Rica, returns to the gate with a mechanical issue. The only available replacement sits across the airport. Moving passengers would mean telling vacationers to switch terminals. Baggage-loaders would need to transport luggage across the airport, potentially making them late to service other flights. The crew would need to move, too. United operations staff, which includes customer service, ramp services and the aircraft move team— decide to tow the new plane to the travelers. Passengers wait an hour longer than they might have if the plane stayed put, but don’t have to drag their belongings across the airport.

The station operations center manager controls UAL holiday travel at Newark Airport.

“This is the center of a spider web,” says United’s station operations center director. If you touch one part of the web—maintenance, baggage, catering—you affect all parts.

For years, Newark has been a source of delays due to a shortage of air-traffic controllers, crowded skies and bad weather, writes The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 30, 2024). When the controllers are understaffed, fewer flights operate each hour. The shortages are particularly difficult for United, which makes up about 75% of Newark’s air traffic. When travelers have a bad experience with a delay or long wait on the tarmac, they often blame United.

Getting operations right is mission-critical, especially during a record-setting time for holiday travel. Throughout the day, staffers monitor what they call quick turns, or shortened times before a plane needs to take off again. Cleaning staff, baggage workers, ramp agents and others associated with prepping a plane use one app that gives specific time requirements for meeting performance metrics. Within 6 minutes of arrival for some planes, the cleaning crew should be on the plane.

The careful choreography of moving planes around a space-constrained airport doesn’t always work when catering is late or bags load slowly. The average taxi time at Newark is about 25 minutes, but can stretch above 40 minutes during irregular operations. The FAA can issue ground stops or delays due to weather.

In Chapter 15, Short-Term Scheduling, we open with a Global Company Profile on how Alaska Air deals with its frequent weather delays. United, as we see at Newark, also faces a slew of operations decisions.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What operations issues must airlines face every day?
  2. How does Newark differ from Seattle (home of Alaska air) and how are they similar?

OM in the News: Changing How Factories Schedule Employees

Until last April, there had really been just two ways to make 350,000 pounds of cheese a day at the Land O’Lakes plant in Melrose, Minn,: Start at 5 in the morning and work till 5 at night, or the other way around.

Rigid factory shifts were the default for churning out cheddar, as they are at factories the world over that make all kinds of products. “The most efficient way to keep production humming uninterrupted, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is to start and end in unison, bundling dozens of individuals’ efforts into a single unit of labor,” writes The Wall Street Journal (March 11, 2024).

The rigid schedule makes sense logistically. Each day, 70 or so trucks from member farms empty milk at the Melrose plant. Converting the unending inflow of milk into 500-pound blocks of cheese requires running the factory 24 hours a day. Divvying the day up into 2 shifts makes it easier for supervisors to ensure sufficient staffing.

But in recent years, the plant has struggled to find candidates willing to work full-time—a problem emerging across the company–and the country. There are less and less people going into manufacturing every year. And, like many employers, Land O’Lakes found its rigid traditional shift system buckling.

When companies need to boost hiring, higher wages are usually the lever they pull because it’s logistically easier to adjust to higher labor costs. But “giving workers more control over their schedules is a very valuable aspect of the job,” says a Land O’Lakes executive. Now employees choose their own start times and shift lengths.  Part time positions proved easier to fill than full-time openings, and had the knock-on benefit of boosting retention.

There are some trade-offs. The company needs 2 or 3 flex workers for every full-time employee, raising the cost of training. There are also increased costs that come with figuring out the weekly shifts. Some of this, however, is offset by cutting back on overtime pay.

Flex employees work with their supervisors every couple of weeks to choose their shifts. The supervisors then cobble together the schedule each day of the week, ensuring that all positions are covered.

Factories all over the U.S. are hiring only 6 people for every 10 openings posted, compared with 8 or 9 a decade ago. And some 2.5 million factory workers will retire by 2030, contributing to a shortage of around 2.1 million manufacturing jobs.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. This system works well in the service sector, but will it work in all manufacturing companies?
  2. Why is there a shortage of manufacturing workers?

OM in the News: The Great Southwest Air Christmas Meltdown

On pages 608-9 of your text, the Global Company Profile for Ch. 15 features Alaska Airlines and is titled “Scheduling Flights When Weather is the Enemy.” The case study in the Linear Programming chapter (Module B) discusses how LP software drives staff and plane scheduling in that industry.

Southwest Airlines software is an aging in-house system called SkySolver, which as The Wall Street Journal (Dec 29, 2022) writes: “This Christmas, SkySolver not only didn’t solve much, it also helped create the worst industry meltdown in recent memory.” SkySolver was overwhelmed by the scale of the task of sorting out which pilots and flight attendants could work which flights. Crew schedulers instead had to comb through records by hand.

 Even as SkySolver tried to solve one set of problems, new ones would emerge. Crews and planes were out of place. Phone lines jammed up, and Southwest staffers trying to get assignments couldn’t get through to the scheduling department. The airline was scrambling just to figure out where its crew members were located.

Southwest canceled more than 13,000 flights between Dec. 22 -27, while stranding passengers and bags across the country. This isn’t the first time that a disruption has ballooned at Southwest, and the carrier’s struggle shows how its increasingly complicated network needs a better technology foundation.

Pilots for years complained that SkySolver often spits out fixes that don’t make much sense, sending crews on circuitous journeys around the country as passengers to meet flights, a practice known as “deadheading.”

By Dec. 26, Southwest realized it needed a full reboot. In an effort to get pilots, flight attendants and planes into position, the airline took draconian measures. It canceled two-thirds of its planned flights for multiple days, and locked up seat inventory on its website so customers couldn’t buy tickets for a flight that might ultimately be canceled.

Unlike many rival airlines, Southwest’s planes generally hop from one city to another, rather than orbiting a major hub. That approach lets Southwest maximize use of its planes and crew, but the daisy chain structure also makes its network more delicate—problems in one corner of the country can be difficult to contain.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Why did the scheduling software fail?
  2. What options do operations managers have at this point?

OM in the News: What Went Wrong in Airline Operations?

Airlines are struggling through one of the most severe and persistent mass-cancellation events of the past decade, reports The Wall Street Journal ( Jan. 8-9, 2022). Covid-19 infections surged too quickly for carriers to manage without upending holiday travel, wreaking havoc on already-stretched airline workforces. Now carriers are assessing how to better manage what could continue to be a difficult period, at least for the next few weeks.

A packed Miami International Airport on Jan. 3.

Airlines have canceled more than 1,000 daily U.S. flights for 13 straight days, including over 2,600 on January 7, as another winter storm brought snow to Boston and New York. Flights scrubbed from Christmas Eve through Jan. 6 exceeded 24,000, roughly 7% of the number airlines had planned to fly.

For airlines, the upheaval of the pandemic is heading into a new phase. Unlike in early 2020, when terrified passengers canceled trips in droves, new variants dent but don’t decimate appetite for travel. But airlines are still rebuilding their operations. The twin challenges of rising numbers of employees calling out sick after being infected or exposed to Covid-19, and a series of severe winter storms that hit major hubs, created the perfect conditions for travel chaos.

The trouble spiraled as more workers became infected. Entire crews were testing positive–and when they’re out of the country, there’s no way to get that aircraft back.  In December, airlines asked the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to consider halving its recommended 10-day isolation period for fully vaccinated people who come down with Covid-19, citing potential workforce shortages.

“What we learned is you might need a little more resources to fly that same schedule because of all the other things that are in play,” said American’s COO. Airlines operate under strict safety rules that can leave them little recourse but to cancel flights when they are short of staff in the right places. Pilots aren’t always trained to fly multiple aircraft types, for example. Regulations dictate how much rest crews must get between shifts. And employees such as flight dispatchers and mechanics can take on only so much extra work safely.

Recall that we open Chapter 15 (Short Term Scheduling) with the story of how Alaska Airlines deals with weather delays. This WSJ article makes a good complement, with the Covid addition.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What could operations managers have done to prepare for the current crisis?
  2. Which of the options for managing capacity noted in Supp. 7 apply to airlines today?

OM in the News: Why Do the Empty Planes Keep Flying?

An Atlanta-to- Baltimore Delta flight on April 20

Many of us are wondering why airlines continue to fly nearly empty airplanes. It seems like they are burning cash, fuel and goodwill. Don’t they know what they’re doing? They do, says The Wall Street Journal (May 7, 2020).

Airlines scrambled in March and April to ground as many trips as they could. But they still found themselves locked into flying many trips with hardly any passengers for a number of OM reasons that show just how complex airline schedules are and how hard the choices are that OM executives must make.

Airlines have grounded 3/4 of their capacity, and it still hasn’t been enough. More than 90% of traffic has disappeared. For American, 99% of flights have been less than 20% full. Besides critical travel for funerals, medical reasons, etc., there are often operational reasons that they need to fly with 2-3 people on board.

A flight might have to go with 2 fliers because a later flight in that plane’s schedule had 60 waiting. Sometimes it isn’t the aircraft that had to get there, but the crew needed somewhere else for later flights. Some aircraft need to get to a maintenance base for overnight routine work. Overnight parking is in short supply at many airports housing grounded planes. So a jet may need to make the last trip of the day with 1-2 passengers just to get to its assigned parking space. And a few passengers might luck out because the plane has a large cargo payload–often medical supplies.

Now a growing concern is that there will be heavier loads on flights where passengers won’t be able to socially distance. Adding to the complexity is a requirement in the federal airline bailout (Cares Act) that requires airlines to maintain service to all the cities they currently serve. Finally, because of the complexity of schedules, airlines need to figure out which aircraft to put in storage while facing uncertainty over travel patterns in the pandemic.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. List some of the operations issues airlines are now facing.
  2.  What percent of your class is willing to fly in the next 4 weeks?

 

OM in the News: The NBA’s “Dirty Little Secret”

“There’s not a factory on the planet,” says one scientist, “that would move shift workers the way we move NBA players.”

IT’S THE AFTERNOON of Feb. 26, during a 3-games-in-4-nights stretch, and Miami Heat center Hassan Whiteside is on a roll. Tomorrow night, his Heat will host the Golden State Warriors, then fly to Houston to face the Rockets on Feb. 28. But now he’s rattling off what time the Warriors game will end (10 p.m.), when they’ll board their flight (after 11:30), when they’ll land in Houston (2 a.m.) and arrive at the hotel (3 a.m.) before playing the Rockets later that day.

Sleep matters, Whiteside says — it matters a lot. It “could be the difference between you having a career game or playing terrible.” Is it possible within the current NBA schedule to obtain consistent, quality sleep? “Nah,” Whiteside says. “It’s impossible. It’s impossible.”

Fatigue has long been a reality of life in the NBA, a league with teams that play 82 games in under 6 months and fly up to 50,000 miles per season — enough to circle the globe twice, reports ESPN.com (Oct. 14, 2019). Over the 2018-19 season, the average NBA team played every 2.07 days, had 13.3 back-to-back sets and flew the equivalent of 250 miles a day for 25 straight weeks.

Despite the league’s best efforts — lengthening its schedule in recent years, reducing back-to-backs for 5 straight seasons (down to an average of 12.4 per team in the coming season), eliminating 4-in-5 stretches, reducing the nationally televised games that tip off at 10:30 p.m., creating more rest days — sleep deprivation remains “our biggest issue without a solution. It’s the dirty little secret that everybody knows about,” says an NBA exec.

“I think in a couple years,” Tobias Harris says, “sleep deprivation will be an issue that’s talked about, like the NFL with concussions.” During the season, its estimated that players get 5 hours sleep per night. Chronic sleep loss has been associated with higher risk for cancer, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, heart attacks, Alzheimer’s, dementia, depression, stroke, psychosis and suicide.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. How is this an OM issue?
  2. What can be done to alleviate the problem, and what dangers are possible if it isn’t addressed?

OM in the News: How Boston Saved $5 Million Scheduling School Buses

“The yellow school bus has remained largely unchanged since it first debuted in 1939,” writes Route Fifty (Aug. 12, 2019). But while the buses look the same, their routes have grown infinitely more complex in the past 80 years, as the number of students, schools, and road systems grow and change. Drawing bus routes for Boston Public Schools (BPS) involves challenges unique to the city, which allows parents to select their child’s school from a list of 10 options. The resulting bus routes can be meandering and complicated.

School buses line up in Boston, a city with one of the most challenging systems to route

In 2017, the district was facing serious challenges. On a per-pupil basis, BPS had the highest transportation costs in the country, $2,000 per student per year, representing 10% of the district’s budget. The schools dealt with rising costs each year, despite declining ridership. The on-time performance rate of their buses was also well below that of other large districts.

Quirks can create millions of decision variables that affect any solution. These include varying road widths, differing bus infrastructures, students who require the same bus driver every year, students who have monitors, and students who have been in fights and, therefore, need to be on different buses.

The MIT team selected to tackle the problem replaced what had before been an incredibly laborious process, one that took 10 school system routers thousands of hours to create custom routes for each child and school. In 30 minutes, the new algorithm created a system-level route map that was 20% more efficient than the ones done by hand. And the longer the algorithm runs, the better solution it produces, until it cannot be improved. Running the algorithm in 2017 allowed BPS to eliminate 50 buses, an 8% drop in the fleet that was the largest Boston had seen in a single year. Buses drove 1 million fewer miles that year and cut 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per day. The district reinvested the $5 million saved back into classroom initiatives.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Why is scheduling buses so complex?
  2. How does this differ from scheduling a fleet of airplanes?

OM in the News: Scheduling Your Fleet of Planes When 737’s Can’t Fly

Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 MAX aircraft parked in Victorville, Calif

Airlines around the world sped Boeing’s 737 Max into service, eager to capitalize on its efficient engines, writes The New York Times (April 12, 2019). Some low-cost carriers built new routes around the Max, which could travel farther on less fuel than its predecessor. But with the Max grounded following two deadly crashes, the airlines that rely on its planes are scrambling to adjust, and the costs are mounting.

Major carriers, including Southwest, American and United, have canceled thousands of flights. Boeing has slowed production of the Max and stopped deliveries, stockpiling the finished planes in Seattle. And there is no firm timetable for the return of the Max. (One industry analyst predicted a return between August and November).

American, which operates 24 Max planes and has 76 more on order, canceled 1,200 flights in March, and said it would have to cancel an average of 115 flights a day through August. American has been trying to spread the effects throughout its system, pulling aircraft from routes with multiple flights a day to service flights normally operated by a Max. Southwest, which has 34 Max jetliners and was operating about 140 flights a day with the plane before the grounding, has adjusted its schedule through August. United, which has 14 Max planes, expected 130 related cancellations this month.

Other airlines that don’t have many spare planes to use in a pinch are feeling the impact. At WestJet, a Delta partner, the rest of the fleet has to fly more with less downtime. Says the VP: “We’re flying the airplanes hard. That puts a lot of strain on the organization.” India’s SpiceJet, a big low-cost carrier, said it plans to rent 16 older Boeing 737-800 jets to partly fill the gap from grounding its 13 MAX planes and the 21 more due to arrive this year.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Compare these scheduling issues to those in Ch. 15’s Global Company Profile “Scheduling Flights When Weather is the Enemy”.
  2. What are the options that airlines have?

OM in the News: Using OM to Fix School Bus Routes

Last year, more than 30,000 students in the Boston Public Schools rode 650 buses to 230 schools at a cost of $120 million. In hopes of spending less this year, the school system offered $15,000 in prize money in a contest that challenged competitors to reduce the number of buses. The winner, reports The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 12-13, 2017), was MIT’s Operations Research Center, which devised an algorithm that drops as many as 75 bus routes.

The school system says the plan, which will eliminate some bus-driver jobs, could save up to $5 million, 20,000 pounds of carbon emissions a day and 1 million bus miles each year. The computerized algorithm runs in about 30 minutes and replaces a manual system that in the past has taken transportation staff several weeks to complete. “They have been doing it manually many years,” said the MIT Center co-director. “Our whole running time is in minutes. If things change, we can re-optimize.”

The task of plotting school-bus routes resembles the classic exercise known as the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), where the goal is to find the shortest path through a series of cities, visiting each only once, before returning home. Although we don’t cover TSP in the written text, we do so in our MyOMLab Tutorial called Vehicle Scheduling & Routing.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Provide other applications of TSP.
  2. How does this scheduling problem differ from that of airlines scheduling planes and crew?

OM in the News: The Airlines’ On Time Flight Game

Today’s pop quiz: If Delta and American both have flights from Dallas to Detroit leaving at 11 a.m., and both flights take 2 hours, 53 minutes to get to the gate in Detroit, which one is late? The answer: American Flight 43. American schedules that trip at 2 hours, 38 minutes. Delta Flight 653 is scheduled to make the trip in 2 hours, 47 minutes, with 9 minutes of extra cushion. The same travel time could leave American 15 minutes late—tardy in DOT statistics. Delta, only 6 minutes overdue, would be considered on time.

“Every airline gives itself extra cushion in its schedule to account for weather delays, mechanical repairs, air-traffic control slow-ups and a thousand other things that leave planes and passengers stewing,” writes The Wall Street Journal (June 29, 2017). In 2016, 86.5% of Delta domestic flights arrived on time under the DOT’s definition, which is at the gate within 14 minutes of scheduled time. That was best among the 4 biggest U.S. carriers. This on-time performance is a competitive battle. Reliability matters to frequent fliers. Several airlines pay employees bonuses based on on-time arrivals.

This year, Delta’s flights have been scheduled about 9 minutes longer than they actually took, on average, a 6% cushion. In 2009, Delta’s scheduled just 2 minutes of padding, or 1.4%. That year only 78.6% of Delta flights arrived on-time. Better-managing maintenance and employees played a major role.

The airline says it increased scheduled time and decreased ground time for planes. Often airlines bolster ground time, so a 15 minute delay doesn’t impact the next flight. Delta chose the opposite approach: increasing scheduled time– called “block time,” so 80% or more of its flights arrive exactly on schedule, then shortening ground time between flights.

Every minute added to schedules can increase costs: higher crew pay for trips at many carriers, more planes and gates needed to fly the same number of trips. Adding one minute to every flight costs about $10 million in annual expenses.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What OM tools can be used to deal with airline scheduling problems?
  2. Why do airlines increase their block time?

OM in the News: Delta’s Epic Scheduling Meltdown

 

Delta’s Atlanta hub had dozens of long lines with thousands of passengers waiting for help on Friday, April 7, as thousands of flight cancellations wrecked Spring Break travel plans.

Spring break for hundreds of thousands of Delta Air Lines passengers was disrupted by April thunderstorms in Atlanta that led to an epic OM meltdown, writes The Wall Street Journal (May 4, 2017). At the root of 4,000 canceled flights: telephone busy signals. The biggest problem was that Delta’s 13,000 pilots and 20,000 flight attendants calling in for new assignments couldn’t get through to the people in Atlanta on the front lines of rebuilding the schedule.

Though puzzling in the age of instant digital communications, it turns out employees were dependent on dialing and circuits were overloaded. Computers told gate agents rescheduled crews would be there; customers waited at gates for hours. Then flights would end up canceled for lack of a crew member lost in Delta’s communications fiasco, unaware of the assignment. When crew members called in, they got busy signals since there were too few people to answer calls.

A recovery that should have taken the airline a day or two stretched into the following week. In Atlanta, flights were canceled well after midnight, after airport trains had shut down. That forced dazed vacationers to walk more than a mile through corridors littered with sleeping bodies like a zombie apocalypse. 

One problem was that many positions were short-staffed for holiday crowds because so many Delta employees had themselves taken spring-break vacation. A second problem was trying unsuccessfully to keep more crews together with the same plane all day to minimize disruption. (If a plane, pilots and flight attendants are all scheduled to reshuffle to different flights, a single delay can impact three other flights). A third problem was the undersized crew-tracking team and its phone lines. Delta now plans a system to send crews information about their trips electronically.

Classroom discussion question:

  1. What were the operations issues that Delta failed at?
  2. What OM tools can be used to minimize such breakdowns?

Video Tip: Using Our Five Alaska Airlines Video Case Studies

Barry and Jay filming in an Alaska Airlines cockpit
Barry and Jay filming the videos in an Alaska Airlines cockpit

The Wall Street Journal‘s annual scorecard of U.S. airline performance (Jan. 12, 2017), which ranks major carriers on 7 different measures important to travelers, has just been released.  We note that the company we prominently feature in our latest edition, Alaska Airlines, topped the scorecard as the best overall performer for the 4th-straight year, edging out Delta. Alaska also scored 1st in: on-time arrivals, least extreme delays, least 2-hour tarmac delays, and in least number of complaints. It was 3rd in cancelled flights and involuntary bumping, and 4th in mishandled bags.

 The Seattle-based airline says its poor baggage showing in the 2016 scorecard drove a deep study of which flights were causing the most mishandled bags. Alaska began bar-code scanning of every bag going on and off planes. It also figured out which cities, which shifts and which flights had the most problems and found delays with bags transferring from other airlines. So instead of waiting for bags to come through an airport sorting system, Alaska now takes carts to other airlines in Seattle and waits for connecting bags at the tails of arriving airplanes.
Here are the 5 short videos we provide free to adopters:

Quality Counts at Alaska Airlines (Ch.6): “If it is not measured, it is not managed,” says one Alaska exec in this case that provides explicit performance metrics.

Alaska Airlines: 20-Minute Baggage Process–Guaranteed! (Ch.7): Students can flowchart the process a bag follows from kiosk to destination carousel after watching this video.

The People Focus: Human Resources at Alaska Airlines (Ch.10): The employee “Empowerment Toolkit” reminds us of Ritz Carlton’s famous customer service philosophy.

Lean Operations at Alaska Airlines (Ch.16): The company’s aggressive implementation of Lean includes its 6-sigma Green Belt training, Kaizen events, Gemba Walks, and 5S applications.

Scheduling Challenges at Alaska Airlines (Module B and Ch.15): Good scheduling of crews and planes means optimization–the perfect fit for our coverage of LP and scheduling.

OM is indeed a centerpiece of Alaska’s success and we think your students will enjoy these videos.

OM in the News: Scrutinizing the Scheduling of Workers at Retail Chains

Aeropostale workers say they are being put under unnecessary stress.
Aeropostale workers say they are being put under unnecessary stress.

The attorneys general of 8 states are scrutinizing big retailers over their staffing practices and whether they require workers to show up or stay home with little notice, reports Fortune (April 13, 2016). Warning letters have been sent to Target, Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, Sears, J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, Williams Sonoma, and other chains they believe are using on-call scheduling.

On-call scheduling systems have made big retailers more nimble, allowing them to staff stores during busy times and save on payroll during slow days. The software used by many retailers forecasts staffing needs based on real-time sales and traffic information.

Some employers require on-call workers to check in by phone, email or text shortly before their shift. If the store is expected to be busy, they must come in; if things are slow, they are told not to report for work, and aren’t paid. These systems have been criticized by worker advocates, who say on-call scheduling makes workers’ lives and pay unpredictable.

The retailers are being asked to provide information about how they schedule employees, including whether they use software from vendors such as Kronos and Workplace Systems to schedule labor hours, or penalize employees who don’t follow on-call procedures. Schedule instability has emerged as a public policy issue in recent months, highlighted in hourly workers’ campaigns for higher wages. A 2015 report examined the prevalence of unpredictable schedules among young adults, and found that 41% receive their schedules a week or less in advance, and half have no input into the timing of their hours.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of on-call scheduling.
  2. Why has this become a public policy issue?

OM in the News: Scheduling Star Wars to Maximize Profits

A Darth Vader serves popcorn to fans on opening night of Walt Disney Pictures And Lucasfilm's "Star Wars: The Force Awakens"
A Darth Vader serves popcorn to fans on opening night of Walt Disney’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is playing in more than 4,100 U.S. theaters this week. And with many cineplexes running non-stop shows in multiple theaters, that adds up to tens of thousands of showings. For Disney, the math is simple: Sit back and watch hundreds of millions roll in. But for movie theaters, reports Marketplace Business (Dec.18, 2015), scheduling Star Wars in order to maximize profits requires some pretty elaborate calculations. There are many factors that come into play when setting a schedule: estimated ticket sales, number of screens devoted to the movie, time it takes cleaning crews to get in and out, and weather and holidays.

While it might seem easier to schedule Star Wars every 15 minutes, this actually is more difficult. First, because the movie is being released in 2D and 3D, theater owners have to predict the demand for both. They also have to decide which other movies they will stop showing to make room for Star Wars. (Theaters don’t start to cash in big on ticket sales until a movie has been playing longer.)

The real money is made at the concession stand. Theaters keep about 5% of ticket sales. Profit margins on concessions can run as high as 85%. It’s essential theaters schedule their movies to start and end at different times. They don’t want too many people coming and going simultaneously which create crowds that slow down the concession counter. Get it wrong, and they will have crowds waiting to buy tickets, in line for the bathroom–and not buying Junior Mints. Some theaters use algorithms and software to do their scheduling. Others still take their cue from Han Solo and go with their gut.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What scheduling tools could theaters use?
  2. Why is this such a complex issue?