Explain the relationship between short-term scheduling, capacity planning, aggregate planning, and a master schedule

The Wal-Mart Company is operating with the scheduling activities by analyzing the demands and needs of the company in an effective manner. The company is operating by hiring some contract based employees with higher wages and meeting their needs of getting paid with fair wages. All the strategies of the employee scheduling of the Wal-Mart America’s stores are linked with smoothing the supply chains and bringing success to the company.

The Wal-Mart Company operates in business segment in the world wide regions. It has three main sub segments including Sam’s Club, Wal-Mart U.S and Wal-Mart International. In this regard, it operates through the retail stores in the worldwide regions with the large range of products and also operates in providing membership to the customers.

The short term scheduling in the company refers to the hiring someone for taking the readily available job for some short term purposes. The short term schedulers have the opportunity to take the highest priority jobs and take the decisions on spot. Therefore, the job takers should be highly capable of performing the duties. The Wal-Mart company for its United States operations has utilized the strategy of short term scheduling. The company has been accused of operating with low cost by cutting the labor wages and the labors of the company were highly unsatisfied. They were not working for the company’ best interest and the bathrooms and the retail shelves of the company were not clean till 2014.

The customers’ complaint about it and the executives of the Wal-Mart Company have developed the strategy for maintaining the short term scheduling for hourly paid employees who can clean the stores of the company as demanded by the customers. In 2015, the company provided training to many people for cleaning the stores and provided them higher per hour wages rate so that the compliant of the customers and stakeholders can be reduced to the higher extent (REUTERS, 2016).

The capacity planning strategies of the Wal-Mart Company are based on the forecasting for the future demand of the products of the company. The capacity building of the company in the loading jobs consist of primarily on the forecasted demand of the logistic business practices of the Wal-Mart. The Company in this regard is making efforts towards the capacity planning for the loading jobs in relation to meeting the needs of the customers. The company tends to analyze the customer purchasing behavior and their needs in relation to forecast the demands of its products and services. Analyzing the pre and post purchase behavior and hires the employees accordingly plans the capacity of the company. This also helps in smoothing the supply chain of the Wal-Mart Company in an effective manner.

The aggregate planning at the Wal-Mart company is based on the supply chains strategy and the human resource planning at the company. In this regard, the Wal-Mart Company utilizes its supply chain through supporting them with human resource management strategies. All of the activities of the supply chain at the company including operations, purchasing, distribution, and integration are linked with recruitment selection and training strategies of the company. It has segregated duties among the employees so that they can add their full efforts in the successful business planning. For example, the purchasing manager at the company deals with the suppliers and determines that which products should have to be sold to which customer and also hires the contract based employees for logistic services.

The master schedule for the employees of the Wal-Mart Company has been announced in 2015. The company announced that the company will increase the minimum wage rate from $9 to $10 for all workers and hourly fixed schedule will be given to the employees which will result in changing the way employees work at the organization. According to this master schedule, the employees will be called at any time in the week and they will be provided higher salaries of the level of services offered in relation to effectively managed supply chain at the company. Thus, the loading jobs at the company will be secured up to the extent the employees are adding their efforts and availability (Ferro, 2015).