Optimal Staffing Policy in Commercial Banks Under Seasonal Demand Variation

According to evidence from research and practice, the seasonal demand variation exists in the banking sector and significantly affects the commercial bank's operation. Thus, the bank needs to adopt a seasonal staffing policy to ensure that the human resources can match the customer demands in different seasons. Otherwise, a shortage or surplus of human resource will occur and negatively affect bank operations. In this paper, we develop a seasonal staffing method to help the bank find the optimal staffing policy under seasonality. To capture the characteristics of bank operations, we model the service systems of n branches in a bank as a n-dimensional M/M/c/N queueing system with balking and reneging. Then a profit maximizing model based on the queueing system is constructed, and it is further simplified through linearization so that the model can be solved in a short time period. In addition, we conduct a set of numerical experiments that not only prove the superiority of our method compared with the traditional methods, but also explore the effects of some key factors on the optimal seasonal policy.