Resource Optimization Tool

Logistics Management Institute (LMI) is a consulting firm that innovates technological solutions for its clients spanning across the defense, space, and healthcare industries. The company is interested in expanding their workforce analytics toolset by digitizing the project assignment process. Current processes are vulnerable to inaccurate estimates of employee skills, project requirements, and project priority. Manually crafting assignments from complex inputs can result in schedules with unequal employee utilization, long project time horizons, and suboptimal project sequencing. LMI has digital tools that quantify employee skills and project requirements and now requires a tool to produce an optimized project schedule. The team developed several mathematical models that are optimized using different solvers, heuristics, and software that converts the mathematical model output into human-readable schedules and performance metrics. This project has provided LMI with a product they can utilize internally or sell to customers to efficiently allocate resources. The optimized assignment approach produces solutions that show several improvements compared to an algorithmic approximation of the current state, with increases in average employee utilization of up to 41% and decreases in makespan of up to 60%.