Shift Scheduling with the Goal Programming Approach in Fast-Food Restaurant: McDonald’s in Kelantan

Abstract

A major fast-food restaurant chain, such as McDonald's, must perform well to maintain its credibility with customers and dominance over other competitors. A fair and balanced shift schedule of workers must be generated to ensure that the workers provide the best service and production for the restaurant. Consequently, this study proposed a fair and efficient workforce schedule at a McDonald's restaurant in Kelantan, Malaysia. Furthermore, the goal programming method and the LINGO software are used in this study to develop the best schedule for the workers over a 28-day period. Five hard constraints and three soft constraints are identified. The primary goal of this study, which demanded the same total workload for each worker, was met. However, the other two goals are not fully achieved but have little impact on the workers due to the 18-hour operation and rotation of schedules among workers. Finally, the generated schedule pattern has been shown to provide a better schedule in terms of having the same total number of shifts for each worker and giving each worker the same total number of off days.