Preliminary modeling and analysis of workforce supply chain management

Corporations have long been focusing on manufacturing supply chain, and developing various methods to turn raw materials into final products. Nowadays, many enterprises like IBM have realized that manpower is one of the most important and expensive inputs for different constituents of the supply chain. It's time to refocus and apply the lessons learned from optimizing your product lines to optimizing your human resource. To maintain sustainable development and to cope with the everchanging world, researchers should study the manpower situation and navigate training needs in various industries. Hence, it is critical to optimize, through a series of strategies, policies, processes and tools, what may be called the workforce supply chain. We try to propose a preliminary network optimization model for professional service firm revenue management under an uncertain environment. Multifunctional staff's capacity allocation is emphasized. The network optimization is in a stochastic programming formulation so as to capture the randomness of the unknown demand. © 2011 IEEE.