(A) simulation model for five-day workweek system

Abstract

The effectiveness of decision-making process based on the computer simulation technique rather than on an intuition or the ``rule of thumb`` is demonstrated. The problem chosen is to decide whether a company should implement the five-day or not. The approach taken in this study is to develop a simulation model which can compare the advantages and disadvantages of the five-day workweek and the six-day workweek it is assumed that the number of work hours in a week remains constant, that is the Saturday``s work hours are distributed to Monday through Friday by making their work hours longer. Although there are many contributing factors in the development of a simulation model for the five-day workweek system, only two major aspects are considered in this study; the energy consumption aspect and the job satisfaction aspect. Gathering and analyzing the real world data, it is found that both hourly oil and electricity consumptions on a day have the K-th order Erlang distribution where the constant K varies with the season. The job satisfaction data collected over many respondents are found to have a normal distribution. For the job satisfaction, the survey form suggested by Porter and Lawler is used which enables one to quantify the degree of job satisfaction. Simulation experiments show that the five-day workweek saves a great deal of both oil and electricity costs and increases the degree of job satisfaction compared with the six-day workweek.