Section Threemaintenance workers. With phased purchasing, all equipment
does not need maintenance at the same time and lower levels
of maintenance workers who have a steady amount of work to
per-form can be maintained.^78
It also should be noted that with some potential
predictors of demand, a doubling of business activity might not
necessarily translate into a doubling of the need for employees
in a particular job category.^79 For example, the number of
kilowatt hours generated by an electric power plant could
double while there is no greater need for safety inspectors or
billing clerks.
As indicated earlier, some forecasting techniques have
both supply and demand applications. Replacement charts and
renewal models have demand implications because they also
indicate vacancies when replacements are promoted into
vacancies at higher levels. Computer simulations also may be
used for both supply and demand forecasting. These
techniques have already been covered in detail and will not be
addressed in this section. This section will briefly describe the
qualitative techniques of heuristics, rules of thumb, and the
Delphi technique. It will focus more extensively on the
quantitative techniques involving management science and
operations research applications and regression analysis.