A stochastic model for determining the necessary staff level in a service industry

Determining sufficient staff levels and providing quality, economical and efficient service is a problem that is difficult for some staffing managers to solve. The objectives in this paper are to derive a stochastic model for determining the necessary staff levels in various service environments such as hospitals, banks, or in manufacturing settings where the demand for a good staff is erratic. In order to assess the proper staff levels, an equation must be used which involves previous service demand hours that are considered as a distribution integrated within the statistical capability scale distribution. The most important property of this staffing model is that the results are independent of the mix of the jobs, the variation of the in-service time for jobs, and the stationary or nonstationary job arrival rate.