Hi Binod:

Manpower planning is crucial in any organisation. Due to recession being experienced in majority of the economies, the concept of “Bench” is in the wipe out phase.

The planning needs to be conducted based on the internal and external projects available in the organisation. The Business Units assign the projects to the respective departments like business warehousing, sales and distribution, material management, etc. The duration of the project, project deliverables, project budget, go live date, roll out, etc are imperative in arriving at the manpower required.

Thanks Sunita. Our department is asked to do a detailed workload analysis to determine the number of staff needed in the organization . I understand it is a difficult one to say the number of people required. I m looking for any exercise done at the organizational level to determine the manpower requirement . Or any instrument that has been used to measure a workload.

Hi Binod:

I have come across a couple of organisations that follow "Trend Analysis" and "Time Series" for manpower planning.

Regards,

You may need to carry out Job Design where you Identify the key tasks/activities to be performed, create groups of related tasks based on skills required to perform them, regroup the these groups (merging others) considering the variety of skills that a worker may have to achieve given tasks. The consider the identity and significance to the job reflected in the group. Study the tasks in the job (group) and ensure that they give some degree of autonomy to the potential job holder. Create links between the different job (groups) to allow for communication and hence feedback to the job holders. Once you do this, you can count the number of groups (jobs) you have created and evaluate how many people can accomplished each of them either working individually or in as a group.

Thanks Loice: Job design is the important component for work load analysis. The specific we could be in preparing the job, the more accuracy looks to be achieved in identifying the skill required, analyzing the time spent in performing and calculating the manpower need. One intern is working on this project in my office . Activities* time* frequency is yielding the time required to perform the job. The total time required is then divided by the total man hour (calculated deducting mandotary holidays) to find out the staff required . Will post when the project is completed n more definite results visible.

In relation to your question on how to measure workload in the organization I would like to suggest literature on relationship of job design and work measurement. In addition it is good to read chapter 5 - job design and work measurement in the book of Chase, Jacobs, & Aquilano. (2006) Operations Management for Competitive Advantage. A share of thought related to your question. I got attracted to this belief of Giffi, Roth, and Seal. They speculate that the 21st century will be marked by the human resource renaissance. Globalization and the successful application of sophisticated process technologies will make the human element even more important to operations competitiveness than before. In their view, this renaissance will be characterized by companies actively cultivating their human resources through careful selection and training of the best and brightest employees, implementing innovative team-based employee involvement programs, developing genuinely participative management approaches, and continually retraining their employees. Work measurement techniques change when level of automation increases. Different techniques to link the employee responsibilities to the time required to complete specific tasks will always be applied in analyzing work methods. However the impact of technology on human resource should be recognized by putting human resource the major key element to obtain the highest productivity.

Florencia: You have clearly identified the needs and importance of human resources in the 21st century. Thanks for the references. Tasks ahead of me is to find the number of employees required for a large organization where about 1500 employees are current working. Based on the workload, we have to conduct a study to determine the required number of staff for the organization. We are moving ahead and your information and references would be great help. Thanks again.

Where do you work? From the profile, it seems like you are working in a bank? If it is a project based organization, I can tell you various methods. If it is a functional organization, I can tell you other methods. 

If it was me, I would do the following:

1. Survey department managers. Ask them the positions and number of people they want and assure them to justify

2. Survey the employees similarly.

3. Ask the inside customers of each department if they are happy with the service they got from the department.

This will give a you big picture. 

For detailed analysis, for example for the call center you have, measure the number of calls for each employee adn the return time etc.

For each department, you have to identify metrics. Send me a message if you need more info

Hi, 

i want to know how to calculate the buyer workload in a company. I need a formula for calculating the buyer workload.

Thanks in advance

chaitanya kumar panguluri

[email protected]