Case Study

Inland Revenue

30,000 staffing decisions made in just five minutes each week

In the Inland Revenue's Tax Credit Office (TCO), allocating staff to workstreams in line with long-term goals and objectives involved assessing trade-offs that were inherently complicated. This was because of the many different combinations of allocations that could be chosen and the many rules or constraints that needed to be followed. It used to take a highly skilled individual at least a week to undertake this complex planning activity, with varying levels of success; and because plans were required weekly, forward planning was seldom undertaken, if at all.

As a result, TCO weekly staffing plans tended to follow historical levels, whether still warranted or not; they were altered only in order to ‘firefight’ short-term issues, without sight of how these decisions could affect long-term objectives and targets.

Following PA Consulting Group’s successful delivery of a Resource Allocation Tool, with its sophisticated mathematical optimisation techniques, the TCO can now easily and routinely plan its operations and allocation of staff to the Tax Credits system, in line with long-term priorities and objectives. This enables them to make more effective and efficient use of their limited manpower resources simply by pressing a button.