MALEA - Workforce planning in the food sector
Besides large-scale industrial production, the majority of food production in germany still takes place in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). These SMEs have one fundamental thing in common: they are labor-intensive and a large number of processes are still carried out manually. From this point of view, it is therefore precisely these companies that usually have great optimization potential for management and planning tasks.
One key process at this interface between high personnel capacity requirements and efficient management is the problem of workforce planning. The challenge of this scheduling task is to optimally allocate the available workforce to shifts and workstations so that all production processes can be carried out and orders can be produced on time. Due to increasing shortage of skilled workers, heterogeneous qualification profiles of employees, modern working time schemes and short-term, volatile incoming orders, planners are faced with a complex challenge.
The team from the Chair of Industrial Management, in collaboration with our project partners Lebensgarten GmbH and Minderleinsmühle GmbH & Co. KG, will examine this everyday problem in more detail in the specific context of the food industry. The corporate group is a leading manufacturer of ecologically and sustainably produced food products in the baked goods, muesli and chocolate sectors, which now has over 500 of its own products as well as contract manufacturing in its portfolio.
The aim of the project "MALEA - Workforce planning in the Food Sector" is to analyze the current overall process of workforce planning and to investigate and identify possible optimization potentials. In the first phase of the two-part project, the focus is on the current planning and review processes, whereby the available master data as well as the legal and internal framework conditions are gathered in particular. Based on this, the findings will be used in the second phase of the project to model the task of workforce planning as a mathematical optimization problem in an initial concept. Finally, the model is to be solved prototypically using a suitable algorithm and examined with regard to its applicability and benefits.
Project duration
01.11.2023 bis 31.03.2024
Responsable staff
Prof. Dr. Udo Buscher
PD Dr. Janis Neufeld
M.Sc. Nadine Schiebold
Dipl. Wi.-Ing. Alexander Blume