Abstract

The case is based on an actual challenge faced by Christie’s Hong Kong, the Hong Kong subsidiary of the renowned auction house. For its biannual auctions, the company needs to hire 200 to 300 temporary sales assistants and assign them to different positions on different days. The human resources team believes that the current manual process of hiring and assignment is labor intensive and is unable to cope with sudden changes. They are looking to streamline the process and use decision tools.

Learning Objectives

After studying the case, students should be able to 1) Understand the tradeoffs and challenges in temporary staffing; 2) Determine the appropriate performance metric for the temporary staffing problem and choose the right decision variables; 3) Model the problem as an ILP; 4) Design a plan to collect the data needed for the optimization of the ILP; 5) Find the optimal solutions for the ILP by using Excel Solver for a small problem; 6) Discuss ideas for simplifying the problem when its size gets large and the potential challenges in implementation.