Scheduling with Solver Microsoft Excel

If your work involves scheduling, maybe you have thought about Solver as an alternative. How did it go? Did you get good results?

Let me tell you about my experience with Solver and Scheduling

If you are an expert on the topic and want to contribute to me and anyone else reading, we´ll be happy to get your feedback.

Solver Scheduler Simplex LP

Let´s start by listing what you can do with this kind of model.

• You can generate schedules for any 5 day service window.
• You can get the most cost-effective schedules based on the shifts you input and their cost
• You can get great schedules based on a specific budget
• You can get great schedules based on a specific number of agents

Now let´s check the steps to using the model

1- Enter Volume, AHT and requirements

2- List the schedules you will give your agents and the cost.

3- Define if you want the best schedules to meet your requirements, if you need to go with a budget, or if you need to go with a number of agents and adjust the Objective accordingly.

This step looks scary at first because here´s where you actually use the Solver but if take a closer look It´s barely 3 inputs we are using.

4- And of course: the outcome

As you can see the Schedules are really close to the Requirements.

Lastly, I´ll mention a couple of things I didn´t love about this kind of model.

• This kind of model is limited to a specific amount of constraints which makes it hard to adapt to a 24/7 model. (I´ll write another article if I figure it out)
• At least to what I have researched thus far all the 24/7 models heavily overstaff weekends and therefore I end up working manually to either fix or create the schedules myself which is not at all the expectation from a scheduling model. More to come on this is If I figure it out.

Disclaimer: This article expresses my opinion on this topic and not that of any company. All data is invented so, don´t try to add up the requirements to the volumes and AHTs.