Management Science Improves Fast-Food Operations

Many small businesses face the problem of scheduling employees with differing work skills and work-time availabilities and preferences to satisfy manpower requirements that fluctuate from hour to hour and day to day. An owner and operator of several fast-food restaurants replaced the time-consuming, nonproductive task of manually scheduling employees with a cost-effective, microcomputer-based employee scheduling system. The system standardized the scheduling process across his restaurants and resulted in higher quality schedules from both the management and employee viewpoints.