The challenges in human resource allocation drive the present project. Conducted at an
office of the Workers' Compensation Board of British Columbia (the WCB), the project
aims at developing a simulation model of claim management operations to facilitate
decision-making in resource allocation. In this context, resource allocation refers to the
alignment of staff to claims. The components of the problem include the number of staff
required and the types of staff required, given targeted system performance.
The volume of claims, the profile of claims, the Workers Compensation Act, the board's
business guidelines and the board's operational targets all influence staffing requirement.
It is far from straightforward to answer the following questions: what is the optimal level
of staffing? What is the right mix of skills? And what is the proper alignment of staff
with claims? How will the system perform given a certain staffing level? How will
change in the profile of incoming claims influence staffing requirement?
A discrete-event simulation model was developed as a decision support tool in this
project. The model was used to evaluate several resource allocation scenarios.
Simulation showed that timeliness measures such as time to decision and time to closure
would improve with additional resources, but the improvement was not drastic. At the
staffing level of 14, compared to the current level of 12, time to decision for
unadjudicated claims would reduce by 6%. Simulation further showed that specialization
of staff by claim type might have a negative impact on system performance measures,
because economics of scale were compromised. Finally, simulation showed that if Site
Visits, a required procedure for adjudicating claims related to Activity-Related Soft
Tissue Diseases, could be conducted by dedicated personnel, time to decision for these
claims might reduce by as high as 60%.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/10721 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Lin, Claire |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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