Access Type

Open Access Dissertation

Date of Award

January 2015

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

First Advisor

Kai Yang

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the operations problems in non-profit hospital call centers with inbound and outbound calls service blending.

First, the routing policy for inbound and outbound calls is considered. The objective is to improve the system utilization under constraints of service quality and operators' quantity. A collection of practical staffing assignment methods, separating and mixing staffing policy are evaluated. Erlang C queuing model is used to decide the minimum number of operators required by inbound calls. Theoretical analysis and numerical experiments illustrate that through dynamically assigning the inbound and outbound calls to operators under optimal threshold policy, mixing staffing policy is efficient to balance the system utilization and service quality. Numerical experiments based on real-life data demonstrate how this method can be applied in practice.

Second, we study the staffing shift planning problem based on the inbound and outbound calls routing policies. A mathematical programming model is developed, based on a hospital call center with one kind of inbound calls and multiple kinds of outbound calls. The objective is to minimize the staffing numbers, by deciding the shift setting and workload allocation. The inbound calls service level and staffing utilization are taken into consideration in the constraints. Numerical experiments based on actual operational data are included. Results show that the model is effective to optimize the shift planning and hence reduce the call centers' cost.

Third, we model the staffing shift planning problem for a hospital call center with two kinds of service lines. Each kind of service is delivered through both inbound calls and outbound calls. The inbound calls can be transferred between these two service lines. A mathematical programming model is developed. The objective is to minimize the staffing cost, by deciding the shift setting and workload allocation. The inbound calls service level and staffing utilization are taken into consideration in the constraints. Numerical experiments are carried out based on actual operational data. Results show that the model is effective to reduce the call centers' labor cost.

Download

Share

COinS