Scheduling Employees in Quebec’s Liquor Stores with Integer Programming

Bernard Gendron ()
Additional contact information
Bernard Gendron: Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-ville, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3J7

Interfaces, 2005, vol. 35, issue 5, 402-410

Abstract: The SAQ (in French, Société des alcools du Québec) is a public corporation of the Province of Quebec responsible for distributing and selling alcohol-based products in its territory through a large network of more than 400 stores and warehouses. Every week, the SAQ has to schedule more than 3,000 employees. Until 2002, it handled this process manually, incurring estimated expenses of $1,300,000 (CAN). I developed a solution engine that interacts with a Web-based database system developed in house to produce the desired schedules. This solution engine implements an integer-programming (IP) model using ILOG Concert Technology and solves the IP formulation with ILOG CPLEX. The project has contributed to increasing the efficiency of the organization by reducing the costs of producing the schedules and by improving the SAQ’s management of human resources. Overall, the SAQ estimates that automated scheduling has saved over $1,000,000 (CAN) annually.

Keywords: organizational studies: manpower planning; programming: integer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/inte.1050.0154 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orinte:v:35:y:2005:i:5:p:402-410

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Interfaces from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().