A Decision Support System for Manpower Planning (Een Beslissingsondersteunend Systeem voor Personeels-Planning

In this report we describe a non-mathematical way a decision support system for manpower planning in Hierarchically structured organisations. It is intended to support medium to long term manpower planning and policy analysis. We describe the decision making context in which the system can be used and give a survey of its contents and its working. Users can define career patterns and manpower policies interactively, and select and adjust one of these available model types. A special purpose data-base was designed to effectively handle the data requirements. A method of linked allocation of dynamically stored personnel records with individual characteristics is used to achieve a high degree of computational accuracy while at the same time keeping memory requirements within the limits. The reports ends with some remarks of the actual use of the system. Keywords Manpower utilization, Management information systems, Netherlands, Personnel planning, Decision support systems, Hierarchical systems, Operations research.