PROCESS PRODUCT INTEGRATED PLANNING IN A MANUFACTURING SYSTEM - A LINEAR-PROGRAMMING MODEL

The aim of this paper is to study possible relationships between business, that is specific production activities, and skills, by this term meaning the most suitable human resource skill structure in order to carry out such activities. The possible ways of analyzing the relationships ''business-skills'' are typically two: the former is based on information of the events that characterized plant production in past years; the latter is to provide a feed-forward analysis of skill needs to accomplish future production processes. The core of this paper consists of design and development of a linear programming model for a decision support in the field of production and human resource integrated planning. The goal of the model is to single out a sort of a flexibility index of a resource structure that allows a comparison among two or more possible structures, on the basis of detailed information, rather than subjective evaluations. Such an index can define resource replacebility efficiency and cost.