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A Consulting Firm Uses Constraint Programming to Plan Personnel-Review Meetings

Author

Listed:
  • Robert M. Saltzman

    (Decision Sciences Department, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, California 94132)

  • Jennifer L. Meyer

    (Strategic Decisions Group, 2440 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, California 94025)

Abstract

A medium-sized consulting firm uses constraint programming to plan its annual meetings of groups of partners to conduct personnel reviews of its consultant-employees. Key constraints include discussing every knowledgeable partner-consultant relationship in at least one meeting; keeping meetings manageable by limiting the number of partners attending and the number of consultants discussed; restricting the number of meetings each partner attends; and requiring the partners who attend each meeting to represent multiple practice areas. Our objective is to minimize the number of situations in which a consultant who is discussed at a meeting has only one knowledgeable partner attending the meeting. Running the model has saved partners from attending meetings unnecessarily and reduced the time required to develop a meeting plan from a few days to a few hours. It has been part of the review-planning process for the past two and a half years.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert M. Saltzman & Jennifer L. Meyer, 2004. "A Consulting Firm Uses Constraint Programming to Plan Personnel-Review Meetings," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 34(2), pages 106-112, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:34:y:2004:i:2:p:106-112
    DOI: 10.1287/inte.1030.0050
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    2. Irvin J. Lustig & Jean-François Puget, 2001. "Program Does Not Equal Program: Constraint Programming and Its Relationship to Mathematical Programming," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 31(6), pages 29-53, December.
    3. Mohan Gopalakrishnan & Srimathy Gopalakrishnan & David M. Miller, 1993. "A Decision Support System for Scheduling Personnel in a Newspaper Publishing Environment," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 23(4), pages 104-115, August.
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