OpenRules, Inc. provides professional services to assist government agencies and large service providers in the strategic workforce planning system development. As a system foundation, we use our COTS product known as "Strategic Workforce Planner" that is oriented to large government agencies that are looking for a realistic and optimal forecast of their workforce based on the expected workload over a period of from 12 months up to 10 years. The product was created based on successful work done by OpenRules specialists for the IRS. This model is known as the IRS Strategic Compliance Planning Model (SCPM).

Strategic Workforce Planner allows an agency to model its current workforce and expected workload by downloading information from an existing system and/or creating and modifying it using a friendly GUI. The product supports a very powerful constraint-based environment that allows an agency to propagate any changes in the workforce over years with respect to promotions, attrition, cost of living, inflation level, managerial, clerical, training requirements, and other administrative and geographical constraints. The product includes several very powerful optimization engines that can identify changes in the workforce to  maximize revenue received from the optimally selected workload over a multi-year period.

Key Features:

• Workforce reshaping based on revenue maximization and optimal use of skills

• Workload-driven staffing

• Baseline workforce projection over the years

• Hiring of new resources

• Career ladder promotions

• Attrition and reduction in force processing

• Transitions of multi-skill resources between different locations, positions, grades

• Minimum/maximum staffing constraints

• Minimum coverage of certain types of work

• Managerial and clerical constraints

• Budgeting constraints

• Training cost consideration

• COLA and inflation adjustments

• Customer-defined business constraints

• Pluggable Optimization Engines based on constraint and linear programming.

Key Benefits:

• Strategic reshaping of the existing workforce to maximize the multi-year revenue from the selected workload

• Respect of the real-world constraints and regulations defined by the Government

• Flexibility in the workforce/workload definition and maintenance

References

     When IRS hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct the review on the SCPM system, they wrote in the final report:

"The underlying constraint programming platform provides a very substantial and flexible array of algorithms, including a state-of-the-art linear programming solver, that can be brought to the task of computing a solution to the workforce optimization problem. The workforce model forms an excellent baseline for developing the workforce transition and availability constraints."
PricewaterhouseCoopers, Critical Review of the Strategic Compliance Planning Model

"The SCPM demonstrates the flexibility of the optimization tools available and the competencies of Dr. Jacob Feldman and his team. We were fortunate enough to be able to visit an earlier client and view a work scheduling engine for a major utility company that Dr. Feldman developed. While we were trying to solve a different problem, that visit helped us in our selection of a right set of COTS products and vendors."
 Ed Emblom, Office of  Research, Internal Revenue Service