A capacity management model in service industries

The problem of capacity management is one of the most difficult to tackle in business management; a situation which is aggravated in the majority of services, due to uncertain demand and personalized requirements, which make it difficult to plan and assign productive capacity. While overstaffing implies extra costs, insufficient capacity implies a lower level of attention to customer needs and therefore a lack of perceived quality. The present article tackles this problem, presenting a model that enables minimum staffing to be easily determined. By taking into account historical staffing data associated with quality data, minimum recommended workload is calculated as a function of the theoretical staff needed according to standard time. The model has been applied in two real cases.