Abstract for:ARRAYS AND LARGE DATA SETS – A SKILLS AND RESOURCES CASE STUDY

A system dynamics (SD) simulator was developed to understand the balance between resource attrition and hiring requirements within a financially constrained environment at and electricity utility in South Africa’s (SA).  Besides the insights gained from running scenarios to investigate resource availability, the requirement for array consistency to manage the resource numbers within the utility’s divisions (up to 15 000 employees) was clear.  Array handling techniques and new calculation methods were successfully implemented to deal with the problem of slow run speeds of the SD model and are detailed in this paper.  In addition, the simulator shows that reliance on natural attrition alone will not be sufficient to reduce staff numbers to set targets.