INF30003 Business Information Systems Analysis

The SwinPublicTransport: Bringing About a Transformation

The SwinPublicTransport was established in 1960, as a separate financial entity, to look after public transportation in Imagination City. The widely dispersed nature of Imagination City’s population poses significant challenges for SwinPublicTransport in its quest to provide efficient and quality services. It employs 550 employees spread over the following departments: Sales and Marketing, Human Resource Management, Operations, IT, Research and Development, Accounting and Finance, and Purchasing. A particularly pressing problem they face is that their drivers do not stay with the company for long, which leads to higher costs of recruitment and training for new drivers.

Sarah, the CEO of Imagination City, has been very concerned with the ever-increasing cost of training new drivers. One particularly restrictive and costly requirement is that each new driver needs to qualify by passing a series of driving tests, and then be accompanied by an experienced driver, acting as a mentor, for at least the first two months of driving. These training procedures were designed to provide the drivers with both a knowledge of their transport routes, and an understanding how to use the company’s logistic system. Obviously, this training is expensive because the company has to pay both the driver and his or her mentor to drive one vehicle in the mentoring period. In other words, two drivers are required to drive one income generating and service providing vehicle.

In recognition of the problem, Sarah has called a meeting to which you have been invited to attend, along with the senior managers. Your role, as a business analyst, is to help them: (1) to analyse the problem; and (2) to come up with an approach to put to the Board.

At the meeting, you take the following notes:

Point 1) Sarah spoke about the problems that come with recruiting and training new staff, she mentioned that, as this process has been very time consuming and expensive, any continuation of this policy would put the company at risk of bankruptcy. She compared the company with its counterparts in other locations and noted that they were generating profits. She added that she heard of the idea of using Virtual Reality (VR) to provide more efficient training, without the need of a mentor. She explained, VR provides a simulated experience that replicates the real world. Her reasoning was that VR could save them considerable costs by making the training process a quicker and more efficient.

Point 2) Ali, a young, ambitious IT manager, was impressed with the idea because current developments in Artificial Intelligence had made this technology feasible. His view was that the company could benefit from VR. He added this technology is not new and have been used in aviation for pilot training and in medicine for training new surgeons. He added that many benefits may arise from the application of this technology, and that it had a proven track record which demonstrated that it works effectively.

Point 3) However, Ali’s enthusiasm for this technologically driven solution was not shared by Clare, the Finance Manager, who cut across him to pose a few points of her own. Those points were that this technology is very costly and, consequently, unviable. She added, even with the technology, the company needed some mentors and trainers. The net result would be that the only difference would be that instead of going into the road to do training, we would do it in the office. She also had misgivings as to whether the technology would provide the same experience as an actual driving. She proposed an alternative approach to spending vast amounts of the company’s limited financial resources on a new technology which was not guaranteed to fix the problem, would be to change the company’s staff retention policies to reduce the turn-over of drivers.

Point 4) John, a soon-to-be-retired Human Resource Manager, joined the conversation by saying to Clare that, according to labour relation’s agreement with the Bus Drivers’ Union, the company could not simply add an extra clause to the driver’s contracts of employment, obliging them to stay with the company. He noted that the company could make it more attractive for drivers to stay by providing them with financial incentives, but this too would be an added expense for the company. John was supportive of the VR option because it could decrease the two-month period of mentor-accompanied driving to just a couple of weeks. This would not only decrease costs, but also speed up the training process by making it more efficient. However, he raised three concerns with regard to using VR technology. Firstly, he questioned whether the company possessed the capacity and skills to work with the new technology. Secondly, he mentioned, we should not forget that training is not just about the driving and learning the routs, actual driving provides an opportunity for the new drivers to be exposed to customers and to develop their customer-relationship skills, both of which are very important to the drivers.