The Trappings of Travel

Wipro Spectramind, a third party provider of BPO services is a full spectrum
service provider. It operates from Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai and the company
is going to open another centre in Belapur. In the BPO industry, customer
satisfaction is directly related to the quality of service that one provides and
it is essentially a process driven as well as a high growth industry in India.
Also business acquisition in this sector is directly related to the strength and
quality of manpower. With a slew of new businesses coming in, Spectramind saw a
phenomenal influx of new employees into the organisation. The difficulty in
managing the database of employees residing in diverse locations in the city
created a substantial problem for Spectramind while managing its transport
system.

A major problem with the transport management was manual route planning for
the vehicles that were used for employee transportation. This created a lot of
operational and cost issues that ultimately reflected in the revenue figures of
the company like escalated logistical cost, irregular arrival time of employees,
employee dissatisfaction, etc. The overall effect had transportation costs
shooting through the roof, increase in cost per employee to the company, besides
the overall productivity of the employees was affected.

These accumulated problems led the management to decide on automating the
whole transportation system. If Spectramind had to increase its profitability,
it had to increase its call engagements. And this was only possible by creating
more employee satisfaction and maintaining a disciplined work schedule. By the
end of 2002, they started scouting for a vendor who could provide a suitable
software package that would meet all their transportation management
requirements.

Why Baan?

Spectramind was looking for a solution, which could take care of the three
essential aspects –on-time arrival, route optimisation, vehicle utilization.
After evaluating various solutions offered by various vendors, Spectramind
selected Baan’s iBaan RoutePro for automating the transportation system.

Spectramind benefited a lot by implementing this software package. First and
foremost iBaan RoutePro was a ready-to-use, off-the-shelf package. Secondly,
this package enabled Spectramind to make better utilisation of the vehicles.
Unlike earlier, vehicles now need to traverse only predefined areas eliminating
the need to cover huge geographical areas. The package also charts the optimal
route mix for the vehicles, which enables maximum number of employee pick-up and
drops; the main parameters used for selecting the routes being ‘least travel
time’ and ‘cost’ among others.

The package also had the functionality of calculating the optimal route
distance and this eliminated overcharging of vehicle rentals, based on the
distance travelled, by various agencies hired for transporting employees.
Geographical pockets were identified so that it could be covered by one vehicle,
which would pick up all the employees in that particular pocket reducing travel
time significantly and turn out to be cost effective. Besides it also enabled
en-route pick-up and drops. Since the travel time was reduced significantly, it
eliminated the monotony among employees caused due to long travel times.

Apart from these apparent benefits that Spectramind derived, incremental
costs that come with any software implementation was also very low as the
software could run using the existing hardware infrastructure. This is primarily
due to the fact that the software is database independent and has high
interoperability. What was earlier a work of hours is just a few computer clicks
away now for Spectramind. Besides, geocoding the data is now less cumbersome as
iBaan RoutePro comes with a digitised map of the entire city with detailing upto
the house and street numbers. This enables drivers to find their way and saves
time and overheads. Following the success of iBaan RoutePro at its Delhi centre,
Spectramind has already started implementing the software in its Mumbai office
for which work is on progress.

Team DQ Inputs for this case study were
received from the company