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Case Study Cable & Moore With the company expanding into several new markets in the coming months, Cable & Moore was anticipating a large in- crease in sales revenue. The future looked bright for this pro- vider of television, telephone, and Internet services. However, management of Cable & Moore was well aware of the impor- tance of customer service in new markets. If customers had problems with new service and could not quickly and efficiently have their problems solved, demand would quickly erode, and it might take years to recover from the bad publicity. Therefore, management was adamant that there be enough well-trained customer service representatives to handle the calls from new customers and from potential customers. Based on experience in other markets, the anticipated number of phone calls to customer service was projected. Given the aver- age call-length, the number of hours of customer-service time from April to August was projected and is shown in the table below. Through experience, management knew that training a new em- ployee well was essential. Each new employee was put through a 1-month training program and was assigned to an existing em ployee for an entire month. Normally, an existing employee would work 160 hours per month. However, when an employee was assigned to perform training of a new hire, the productive work hours for that employee dropped to 80 hours per month. During the training period, the trainee was paid $2,000 for the month. At the end of that time, the monthly salary increased to the standard salary for a regular customer service representa- tive, which is $3,000 per month. In the past, the company lost about 5% of the trained customer service representatives per month due to attrition. While the company is looking to im- prove upon this, for the next several months it is anticipated that this will continue. There will be 150 trained employees at the beginning of April. Management of the company would like to develop a schedule for hiring new employees so that there are sufficient customer service representatives to meet the demand, but this is to be done at the lowest possible cost. MONTH APRIL MAY JUNE JULY Hours needed 21,600 24,600 27.200 28,200 AUGUST 29.700 Discussion Question 1. Develop a schedule for hiring new employees. What is the total cost of this schedule? 2. Discuss any limitations that exist for this solution. 3. How would the schedule change if the attrition rate could be lowered to 3% per month instead of 5%? What would be the impact on the cost

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