chuckcintron
New Member
- Joined
- Apr 8, 2015
- Messages
- 6
I am pretty good at Excel, even wrote a few VBA macros, etc. I can't hold a candle to the experts here, though. And, I'm really not a mathematician by any stretch. But I know what I'm looking for and was hoping someone could point me to it:
I have a team of employees who perform a single task. Purely as illustration, let's say the task is manually counting the number of times a vowel appears in text. Some employees can handle 1,000 pages of text per day and some can handle 500 pages per day. Sure, I could use a computer to do this but I'm not a nice boss and I require my employees to do it manually.
I have books that come into my team which need their vowels counted. Books vary in page count from 100 to 1,000. Each book has a completion value -- for example when we complete the scanning of a book we earn $5, $10 or $100. The value is not dependent on the number of pages; each book comes with it's own valuation.
Each book has a desired deadline date for completion. Each also has a "cannot start before" date, meaning that even if I had the capacity I could not start working on it before clearance to do so.
I have a team of x people who are fast (1000 pages/day) and y people who are slow (500 pages/day).
I need to be able to do a couple of things:
1. Optimize the existing workforce against the known pipeline of demand, and tell the business what my current outlook is to get the demand covered.
2. Work out various "what if" scenarios, based on changing the different constraining variables, including hiring additional staff (with a learning curve before they can be productive).
I know this must be a classical optimization type of problem, and a million people have already come up with tools or Excel workbooks to do this sort of thing. Before I break my pick on trying to learn this theory and implement it in Excel, can anyone point me to a good solution (maybe an example workbook?) that would give me a good head start?
I have a team of employees who perform a single task. Purely as illustration, let's say the task is manually counting the number of times a vowel appears in text. Some employees can handle 1,000 pages of text per day and some can handle 500 pages per day. Sure, I could use a computer to do this but I'm not a nice boss and I require my employees to do it manually.
I have books that come into my team which need their vowels counted. Books vary in page count from 100 to 1,000. Each book has a completion value -- for example when we complete the scanning of a book we earn $5, $10 or $100. The value is not dependent on the number of pages; each book comes with it's own valuation.
Each book has a desired deadline date for completion. Each also has a "cannot start before" date, meaning that even if I had the capacity I could not start working on it before clearance to do so.
I have a team of x people who are fast (1000 pages/day) and y people who are slow (500 pages/day).
I need to be able to do a couple of things:
1. Optimize the existing workforce against the known pipeline of demand, and tell the business what my current outlook is to get the demand covered.
2. Work out various "what if" scenarios, based on changing the different constraining variables, including hiring additional staff (with a learning curve before they can be productive).
I know this must be a classical optimization type of problem, and a million people have already come up with tools or Excel workbooks to do this sort of thing. Before I break my pick on trying to learn this theory and implement it in Excel, can anyone point me to a good solution (maybe an example workbook?) that would give me a good head start?
