ORTEC Predicts the Payback Period for its Workforce Scheduling Software

Eelco van Asperen, Rommert Dekker and Patrick van der Schalk

No EI 2010-72, Econometric Institute Research Papers from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus School of Economics (ESE), Econometric Institute

Abstract: ORTEC is a Netherlands-based software company selling decision support systems based on operations research models. One of her products is HARMONY, a workforce scheduling package. We developed a model to predict its return on investment for a specific customer. The model uses a database of reference implementations to find organizations that are similar to the prospective customer’s organization. The costs and benefits have been broken down into several factors and we use this detailed information from the reference implementations to create a prediction of the return on investment for the workforce scheduling package. Using the information from the reference set allows us to move from industry-averages for potential savings to a prediction of potential savings based on the actual experiences from similar organizations. This also makes the model transparent: the outcomes can be traced to the elements that were selected from the reference set and a detailed description of the model is available. The model has been implemented successfully at ORTEC and has been of decisive value for several prospective customers. From the data analysis it appears that organizations can save a lot both on the time needed for planning and on the amount of personnel needed. In most cases, the payback time of the OR software was less than one year.

Keywords: ROI; cost-benefit analysis; decision support systems; manpower planning; rostering; workforce scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-12-22
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