Employee Scheduling and Goal

Programming in a Midwest Grocery

Store: A Case Study
Elisabeth Rosenfeld, Abby Vlastuin, Kyle Kashuck & Terrance
Thomas
College of Business, Ohio University, Copeland Hall, Athens, Ohio 45701-2979,
rvktconsulting@gmail.com

This paper describes the development of an integer linear programming, and

goal-programming model for Empire Hy-Vee Grocery Store in Sioux Falls, South
Dakota. The primary objective of the model is to optimize Hy-Vees scheduling of
employees during peak shopping times: Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and New
Years Eve, in order to minimize salary costs. A secondary objective is to match
the desired budget for employee wages for these three shopping times based of
of the necessary weights for overnight and day shift stockers and checkers.
Over and under weights for the goal-programming portion of the model were
established by a review of the past three years customer counts per shift and
approved by Empire Hy-Vee management. The model is easily understood, and is
meant to be implemented by Empire Hy-Vee managers and supervisors. The
model, shown in this paper, is a useful tool in developing employee scheduling
interactive spreadsheets for busy grocery shopping days for grocery stores, and
can easily be altered to meet desired constraints.
Keywords: Goal Programming, Grocery Store, Employee Scheduling, Integer
Linear Programming, Midwest.

1. INTRODUCTION
In 1930, Charles Hyde and David Vredenburg opened a general store in
Beaconsfield, Iowa. This small store rapidly grew into a large grocery store chain
called Hy-Vee. Known in the Midwest for its quality products and sensible prices,
Hy-Vee is best known for its superior customer service with its slogan A Helpful
Smile in Every Aisle (2015).
Hy-Vee currently has hired over 75,000 employees and has sales of 8.7 billion
annually. Hy-Vee also ranks among the top 25 super market chains in the United
States with 235 stores throughout the Midwest (2015). Sioux Fall #2 Hy-Vee, also
known as Empire Hy-Vee, located in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is one of the top
five stores in the popular grocery store chain, with over 1.1 million dollars in
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revenue weekly. During major American holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas,

and New Years, sales increase to 1.5 million dollars.
Empire Hy-Vee is interested in launching a chain of restaurants within its store,
and in order for this expansion to be approved Empire Hy-Vee must stick very
closely to its salary budget for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years operations
of sales. To ensure Empire Hy-Vee meets its budget goals this paper reflects our
strategies to optimize their scheduling during these peak-shopping times for
stockers and checkers. Stockers and checkers are interchangeable in Empire HyVees system. It is our hope that by optimizing the scheduling of Empire Hy-Vee
stockers and checkers that:
1. It will cut operating and salary costs
2. Maintain customer service during the restaurant expansion
3. Empire Hy-Vees management will utilize our model in the future
As of right now, Empire Hy-Vee managers use Microsoft Excel to determine
stocker and checker scheduling, but do not use goal programming by utilizing
the tool, Solver, to meet budget goals. The company manually calculates salary
budgets comparing it to desired budgets, and making changes as needed. This
method is not ideal because of the numerous numbers of constraints, and
changes for each shift. According to Empire Hy-Vee management, there has
never been a set budget for holiday peak shopping times. Therefore, not only is
this model of upmost importance to reduce cost for employee wages to ensure
Empire Hy-Vees successful expansion, but the conservative budget given to us is
assumed to be lenient due to minimal past budgeting.
In this paper we ignore full-time and part-time employee designations. There
was no feasible way we could set a constraint for part-time and full-time
company employees because the company fluctuates hours for specific
employees during holidays. For example, students are considered part-time on
payroll, but have the ability to be scheduled for up to eight hours on a particular
holiday to cover certain shifts.
Another assumption is that the total workforce would not change (fires or
hires) between the three holidays chosen to optimize. Also, the shift from
10:00AM-6:00PM will have the highest minimum number of employees on the
majority of days due to the fact this is typically the busiest time of day for
grocery shopping. As discussed earlier, the holiday times chosen to optimize the
companys employee scheduling were Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years,
however to ensure the best results we included the over night shifts before the
busy holiday shopping days: November 24th, November 25th, December 23rd,
December 24th, December 30th and December 31st.
When configuring the weights for certain shifts for the above dates we took the
following notes based of of our conversations with Empire Hy-Vee Management:
November 24th: Saw high importance/weight given to the overnight
stocking crews so that the store would start the day well-stocked and ready
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for shoppers. See shoppers coming later in the day- afternoon/early

evening due to most people having school as well as working on this day.
Budget was lower than Thanksgiving Eve.
November 25th/Thanksgiving Eve- this day had the highest budget because
the store sees the highest number of shoppers of the year on this day.
Shoppers come all throughout the day, but see a higher number shopping
earlier compared to the 24th. High importance given to overnight crews
again as well as more weight given to earlier shift hours.
December 23rd- Overall, Christmas holiday grocery shopping is more spread
out than Thanksgiving for the store. It appears that customers Christmas
get together are more spread out throughout the month of December. They
experience more afternoon/evening shoppers due to many customers
having to work this day. Lower budget compared to Thanksgiving Eve and
less overall workers compared to the two November days.
Christmas Eve- second highest budget. See shoppers earlier in the day
because many shoppers already have some type of event planned for that
night. So more weight/importance was given to earlier shifts.
December 30th- Sees late afternoon to evening shoppers, lowest budget.
Not as much trafic as Thanksgiving and Christmas. See more foot trafic
in the liquor department compared to increased trafic throughout the
store. Higher weight given to night stock to ensure store was properly
stocked, but lower numbers earlier in the day.
New Years Eve- See late afternoon to evening shoppers. Much more of a
mad rush after work for items compared to the other holidays. Tied for
second highest budget with Christmas Eve day.

For our primary goal, for the dates listed above our linear programming model
includes minimum, maximum number of employees that could be scheduled per
shift based of of company guidelines, the number of shifts 1-14, the specific
hours per shift, hourly wage, totals for the shifts, and then the solver solution
with the optimal number of workers.

Figure 1: Shifts & Hours Covered

The secondary part of our goal programming model includes shifts as our
goals, the target based of of management desires, the actual number of
employees per shift, our equations, the percentage over and percentage under
the goal, the weights per shifts, and the total weighted percentage deviations to
see how far our model was of in terms of the number of desired employees per
shift and the budget. This was done for all the days listed above.
Our model consists of linear and goal programming by following the steps
provided by the Clif T. Ragsdale textbook titles Spreadsheet Modeling &
Decision Analysis: A Practical Introduction to Management Science.
The model is created with constraints, assumptions, and variables necessary
to accurately create a useful model specifically for the Empire Hy-Vee Grocery
store. However, the spreadsheet has been created with possible variations for
other grocery stores to use for employee scheduling optimization. Finally, this
paper discusses the methodology, modeling tools, and data sources as well as
results/conclusion.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
To perfect our model for Empire Hy-Vees employee scheduling optimization
we did research over how to accurately create the model. We investigated
Clarence H. Martins paper from the journal Interfaces, titled Ohio Universitys
College of Business Uses Integer Programming to Schedule Classes and
observed he had several constraints for integer programming similar to what is
needed in our model. Martins constraints were the number of classes, maximum
teaching days, time slots, and multiple instructors for the same course,
departmental balance, as well as pre assignments in order to optimize the
scheduling for classrooms within the College of Business (Martin, 2004).
Although Martin used CPLEX, and we did not, the overall structure and
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constraints were very similar, and so we used Martins article as a check

against ours.
Martins decision variables include both binary and continuous variables. In
regards to continuous variables, Martin created them to measure the under
assignments for days, departments, and instructors (Martin 2004). Our
continuous variables were designed similarly to display daily wages based of of
the assigned number of employees per shift. This is further discussed in the
methodology portion of this paper. Martins constraints help us determine the
number of constraints that were not obvious to us in the beginning of the
project.
Another more recent article we used to ensure the success of our model for
Empire Hy-Vee was from the journal Industrial Engineering called Modeling the
labor scheduling problem considering well-being for the clinic's employees
where the objective was to plan shifts for employees at a clinic to minimize the
costs associated to the workforce which similarly in a mixed integer
programming case (Orejuela et al, 2013).
The article had similar demand requirements in terms of a balance amongst
shifts. They also set up their model to include day and night shifts to ensure a
true budget optimization based of of employee wages, which we decided to
include in our report (Orejuela, 2013).
This article also established several hard constraints, which Ragsdale claims
cannot be violated and soft constraints that represent a target that [one]
would like to achieve (Ragsdale, 2007). The articles hard constraints involved
the number of beds in the clinic that, due to legislative policies could not be
altered, and soft constraints, such as the budget that can be more flexible
depending on the weights attributed to them. We determined our hard
constraints based of the minimum and maximum number of employees needed
per shift based of of Hy-Vee policies and management. Soft constraints were the
budget in the spreadsheet that did not need to be met exactly in order for solver
to find a feasible solution.
3. METHODOLOGY & MODELING
The following section holds information over our methodology, modeling, and
our data sources in order to create a beneficial model for Empire Hy-Vee.
3a. RESEARCH GOALS
The schedule optimization modeled in this paper utilizes goal programing.
The objective is to minimize Total Weighted Percentage Deviation (TWPD) for
the 15 goals outlined in the model formation. The model is run iteratively,
varying the required minimum number of employees, the budget, the weights
and the targets for each day. For each day, the stafing level was optimized
according to the budget, weights, and targets. Some of the goals and
improvements expected from the use of this model include:
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1. Improve labor eficiency to address customer volume increase through

adequate stafing
2. Overtime reduction
3. Reduced direct labor costs
4. Provide Hy-Vee with a tool for future scheduling
3b. MODEL DEVELOPMENT
As was mentioned previously, the problem was to determine the optimal
stocker and checker employee schedule for holiday shopping days for Empire
Hy-Vee. These days provide a unique scenario for the store as they see an
increased number of customers and these customers purchase more items.
Consequently, higher numbers of stockers and checkers are needed on these
days. As such, Hy-Vee requested we optimize their stocker and checker schedule
for six days: November 23rd, November 24th, December 23rd, December 24th,
December 30th and December 31st.
Formerly, Hy-Vee relied on the previous years schedule, managers intuition
and over-time hours to cover their busy holiday hours. While this had worked
moderately in the past, they desired to become more eficient and needed to take
many factors into consideration, such as: minimum employees needed per shift,
budget, customer shopping behavior, limited availability of over-night employees
and recommended employee numbers for each shift. We will employ Integer
Programing and Goal Programming with the objective to determine the optimal
schedule for each day and minimize Total Weighted Percentage Deviation
(TWPD). Although the model was tested on a specific application, the model is
robust enough to be applied to other schedule optimization applications.
3c. ASSUMPTIONS
The full-time and part-time workforce is the same. Employees hours can
fluctuate based on availability. For example, a student in high school may only be
part-time on the payroll, but could be scheduled for 8 hours on a particular
holiday to cover hours. Management simple ensures that their total hours are
not exceeded for the week.
Hy-Vee also was not strict on meeting an exact budget. Hy-Vee is similar to
Kroger in that they value customer service above all else. They believe if they
serve their customers well then they will continue to shop at their store, thereby
meeting or exceeding the cost they put in for employee wages to serve the
customer. In fact, the store had never set a budget for their holiday shopping, so
this was based on past expenses. So the estimates they gave us for budget
restriction are assumed to be accurate.
Our project also assumes that the store trends we saw with customer
shopping behavior are applicable to other stores across the nation. In addition,
we assume that customer-shopping behavior will not have significant changes in
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the future. However, our model would be able to accommodate such changes. We
also assume that the total workforce will not change between the various
holidays, when in fact people may quit or more people may be hired during those
times.
3d. MODEL FORMULATION
The following is a basic mathematical explanation of utilizing goal
programming to find the optimal employee schedule:
I (Independent Variable) T (Target) A (Actual) U (Under Target Amount)
O (Over Target Amount) G (Goal Equation)
Integer programming was utilized to determine the actual number of
employees assigned to each shift. The fifteen independent variables include
fourteen shifts and the budget. These can be subject to the following:
Gi = A i + U i - Oi
Where the goal is equal to the target variable. Percent Deviation (P) is then
calculated by Pu i / T i and Poi / T i . Where Pui is the percent under the
target and Poi is the percent over the target. By multiplying the percent
deviations of all 15 independent variables by their respective weights, the total
weighted percent deviation (TWPD) can be found. The objective is to minimize
TWPD to find best fit. An example can be seen below:

Figure 3: TWPD for December 23rd 2015

In order to develop the model, we first looked at Hy-Vees current shifts for
their checkers and stockers. Next, we looked at the hourly wage for the various
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shifts. As noted in the excel file, shifts that required overnight hours are paid
the highest, while shifts that require more regular/daytime hours are paid less.
Our next task was to determine the minimum and maximum number of
employees needed per shift.
The minimum number of employees was
determined by looking at the past three years of holiday schedules as well as the
current daily customer count. The minimum number of employees is counted by
determining who was originally on the schedule as a stocker/checker. Hy-Vees
policy when they fall behind is to call employees from other departments to
stock or check. Employees called from other departments are required to type
in their ID to record their hours stocking/checking, thus these employees were
eliminated from our count. The minimum number of employees was counted for
each shift for the past three years and because of the increased daily customer
count this year, the highest minimum of the three years was chosen for each
shift. The maximum number of employees was established by the total number
of spots they have available for each shift.
Human Resources was able to provide the total workforce available to
stock/check on our shopping days as well as the limit on the number of overnight
workers. Because the store does so much revenue on these days, employees are
not allowed to request vacation or time of, thus we did not need to take any
unavailable employees into account. Additionally, Hy-Vee requires their daytime
stockers/checkers to be available to work any of the shifts on these holidays to
ensure they can meet the needs of their customers. Thus, we did not have
limited employee availability for daytime shifts. Hy-Vee also has flexibility in that
if certain employees were not employed on a specific day, they will be scheduled
on another day during the week. This allowed the total number of employees
assigned to be less than or equal to the total number available.
Hy-Vee hires many high school students who can be involved in practices and
events, these employees would receive preference to be placed into the later
shifts, however there is not a method to account for this in our model. Hy-Vee
had not established a budget for their stockers/checkers in the past, thus the
stocker/checker paid wages from the previous year were utilized and rounded up
to the nearest thousandth dollar to help account for yearly wage increases.
The respective weights for each shift were established by taking an average
of the last three years customer count per shift. This gave us an indication into
customer shopping behaviors and which shifts were more important than others
for any given day. Weights were assigned accordingly. Shifts that did not
receive higher weights were given weights of 1:1 to indicate that we wanted to
be as close as possible to the target. Higher weights were given to overnight
shifts on November 25th and December 24th, which was due to the increased
number of shoppers who shopped early on those holidays. As such, it was
deemed essential to make sure the store was properly stocked overnight to meet
the demands of earlier shoppers.
As such, it was deemed essential to make sure the store was properly
stocked overnight to meet the demands of earlier shoppers. The target number
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of employees needed per shift was established by taking the average of the last
three years total stocker/checkers used. This number included even those
employees who were called from other departments to assist. This was then
rounded up to the nearest whole number. One additional employee was added to
each shift that was given higher weights than 1:1 to account for the increase in
shoppers Hy-Vee has seen this year compared to years past. All weights, targets
and minimum employee numbers were approved by Hy-Vees Manager of
Perishables, who currently oversees stocker/checker scheduling.
The spreadsheet can be set up in a manner that allows a user to easily vary
budget, wages, target employee needs and constraints. Enough flexibility is
built in so the user can optimize most variables with minimal modifications.
3e. MODEL DISCUSSION
The objective function is minimization of TWPD, i.e., get as close as possible
to meeting our fifteen target goals. The number of workers, which were our
changing cells, were made integer because we are determining the number of
employees. The fifteen goals include estimated employee needs for each shift
and the daily budget. The model was subject to multiple sets of constraints:
C1
Minimum number of employees needed per shift
C2
Maximum number of employees who could be assigned to each shift
C3
Total work force available: 110
C4
Number of overnight employees available: 31
Constraint (1) sets the number of employees per shift greater than the
minimum needed. Constraint (2) sets the number of employees per shift less
than the maximum allowed. Constraint (3) sets the total number of employees
assigned to work less than the total amount available. Constraint (4) restricted
the total target number for overnight shifts less than or equal to 31.
The target number of employees estimated for each shift and budget change
each day. As mentioned above, the under-weight and over-weight values were
established on review of customer shopping behavior. By placing a highernumber on being under-weight in certain shift categories, it instructs our model
to give these shifts priority in ensuring the shift meets its target employee
number goal. This ensures the store has enough employees when it needs it
most. An example is shown below:

Figure 4: Goal Programming

4. MODEL VARIATIONS AND LIMIATIONS
The model described thus far dealt precisely with the issues involved with
this case study. However, the model can be easily adapted to address other
scheduling needs or be utilized by other businesses besides grocery stores. For
example, this model can be used for scheduling further employees throughout
the various departments in the store. The weights, target goals, wages, budget
allotment, minimum employees needed, maximum employees allowed and shift
hours are all adjustable to fit the needs of each department. This model could
also be expanded to include regular weekly schedule assignments by
constructing each shift into its own weekly schedule. This would require
additional constraints for the number of available employees per shift.
Smaller businesses without the variables listed above may find this model to
be time consuming and inefective to meet their more basic needs. This model is
also limited in that it is an excellent first step in establishing the optimal shift
number, but requires a second step in generating the list of employees who will
be placed into each shift. Additionally, the success of this model is limited by the
accuracy of predicted shopping behaviors and shift needs in order to assign
proper weights and targets to various shifts.
5. DISCUSSION OF RESULTS
The days that were used in the global programming model were: November
24, Thanksgiving Eve, December 23, Christmas eve, December 30 and New
Years Eve. Based of our findings, Christmas Eve had the highest actual budget
of $10,422.52. More weight was placed on the earlier shifts due to customer
shopping behavior earlier in the day as many customers attend events Christmas
Eve night. November 24, Thanksgiving Eve and Christmas Eve all used the
maximum amount of employees. Christmas Eve had the lowest TWPD, as the
schedule on Christmas Eve was the closest to achieving all of the goals.
Figure 5, shows the statistical breakdown of each day. The budgets (both
actual and target), the TWPD, total number of employees stafed and goal
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programming notes we feel is the most important information for Hy-Vees

management.
We were unable to achieve all 15 goals in any of our schedule optimizations.
However, we were able to meet the target goals for all shifts that were given
higher weights. We consider this to be the most important piece of our project
and believe this will allow the store to better serve their customers during peak
shopping times and potentially create repeat customers due to the excellent
service. Our TWPDs ranged from 170.56% to 427.82%. Part of this can be
attributed to not reaching our budget on any of the shopping days and the
weight of ten that was given to being over the target budget. While we
acknowledged Hy-Vees budget was lenient based on no prior records, we still
wanted to strive to reach the budget as closely as possible. Additionally, some of
the percentages may seem artificially inflated due to the small number of
employees needed on certain shifts. For example, on December 30th, the target
for shift one was 10 employees while the actual number assigned was 8. While
this is only a variation of two employees, it results in being 20% under goal.
We were unable to meet the target budget for any of our days, however we
do not believe this disregards the use of our model. Because a set budget had
never been developed in the past during the holidays, we attribute not reaching
this goal to a lack of an accurate budget target. Additionally, because Hy-Vee
focuses on customer service and is willing to pay employees to help better serve
their customers, this is not a serious issue for the company. The largest
diference we saw in the target and actual budget was 2,767.24 on December
30th. Per the Empire Hy-Vee, an average customer order on this day is
approximately 70 dollars. Thus, to make up for this diference the store would
need to serve an additional 40 customers which is not unreasonable during this
time.
An area that could be improved is the budget for their employee scheduling.
Hy-Vee has never set an actual budget for scheduling their employees on
holidays, and the budget used was an estimation from the wages paid last year.

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Figure 5: Table of Summary of Results

6. CONCLUSION
In summary, a mixed integer linear programming model using a common
spreadsheet application was constructed to determine the optimal schedule for
employees around various holiday seasons. The capability to determine the
optimization of schedule and schedule changes is a useful tool for daily
operations or long-term planning. The model can be utilized as an efective
decision-making tool that managers and line supervisors could use to improve
how they schedule their employees. This model can also be successfully applied
on a broader scale to many diferent companies, as long as the store operates on
an hourly schedule.
Hy-Vee will be implementing our scheduling results on December 23rd and
24th. This will provide tangible results to determine whether our methodology is
successful in fulfilling the stores checker and stocker needs. Additional
feedback from Hy-Vee will include the total number of customers seen, average
customer time spent checking out and as customer shopping reviews, which can
provide additional sources of revenue for the company should they reach high
customer satisfaction levels. As such, extending the model by using it on a full
time basis could be beneficial to the future of the store. After using the optimal
schedule for the holiday season a plan can be put in place to use this method
later on down the road. We have certainly enjoyed working with Hy-Vee and we
look to further our relationship as time goes on.
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REFERENCES
Haensel, M. (2015, January 1). Manager of Perishables, Empire Hy-Vee [Personal
interview].
Martin, C. (n.d). Ohio university's college of business uses integer programming
to schedule classes. Interfaces, 34(6), 460-465.
Orejuela, J. P., Pea, D., & Bustamante, N. (2014). Modeling the labor scheduling
problem considering well-being for the clinic's employees. Ingeniera Y
Competitividad, 16(1), 11-21.
Ragsdale, C. (2005). Spreadsheet modeling and applications: Essentials of
practical management science (5th ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson Brooks/Cole.