The Labor Assignment Decision and Application of Work Flow Structure Information

The movement of workers among machines is a tactic often employed by job shop managers to break bottlenecks and smooth the flow of work. Despite its common occurrence in industrial practice, the problem has only recently received attention in the management science literature. The purposes of this paper are (1) to discuss the nature of the labor assignment problem in job shops, and (2) to suggest a procedure for making labor assignments at the time of actual production. The significant features of the specific rules suggested are that they use aggregate information on work flow patterns in the shop, and that they make fewer labor transfers than other rules which have been suggested.