Assessment1 (10 marks)

Employee Pick-ups and Drops at Convergys

One look at Ipininder Singh, director-technology, Convergys, and you know little fazes the
man. His lithe frame and steely gaze leave little doubt. But then, maybe all he needed was for
the right project to come along, a project his own size. And Convergys had something just in
his range. When Convergys launched operations in India in 2001, it--intentionally or not--
created waves in the Indian BPO industry. It was the largest contact center in India at that
time with two facilities in Gurgaon.The Delhi NCR region, especially Gurgaon, was being
developed as the hub for BPO operations, thanks to cheap real estate. But while Gurgaon
allowed companies to lower cost on the property front, it created other costs. Limited
connectivity from Delhi, poor infrastructure, and shifts in the middle of the night forced
BPOs to introduce pick-ups and drops for employees. Little did they know that they were
creating a Frankenstein.

Today, after employee salaries, transport is the biggest single cost for BPOs, at between 12-
15 percent of total operational expenses.That's a reality that Convergys cannot get away from.
Over the last decade, Convergys has grown to six contact centers, with three facilities in
Gurgaon and one each in Bangalore, Thane and Pune. With 10,000 employees across India,
Convergys has to organize 20,000 pick ups and drops a day, that's over half a million a
month.

The exercise gets harder if you try, as Convergys must, to create the most optimal route for
its fleet of cabs; one that ensures employees have to travel the shortest distance--you won't
want employees to arrive tired--yet one that requires the least number of cabs. Convergys
sources over 1,000 cabs all over India from 40 vendors. Add to that the complexity of
adjusting to 44 different shift timings and employees with different weekly holidays. "The
entire process of creating the routes, assigning cabs, slotting employees and monitoring the
cabs was manual," says Singh "And like every manual process, the system was flawed, had
loopholes, and was highly rigid and inaccurate."

But when Singh decided to do something about it, he was told that there was very little he
could do. "Every technical solution provider I went to told me that this was how the transport
system worked across the industry and that I would have to live with this necessary evil,"
recalls Singh. With no ready software to fix the problem, Singh decided to roll up his sleeves.
"I told my team that the only way we could clean up this mess was getting our hands dirty,"
he says. Singh confesses that the sheer size of the project, with its multiple layers of
intricacies, scared him. Breaking it down into smaller pieces helped. "Sometimes, we try to
boil the ocean. When things are totally new, one should try to build small automation pieces,
tie them together and then build on the innovation," he says. He did just that and created was
a model that the industry would emulate.
Where Does Geeta Go?

Among the most complicated steps in transport management is rostering--the act of creating a
plan of who is going where, from which location, at what time, on which day. The rostering
problem is so complicated it's classified as NP-Hard. Problems in this category are so
complex that it's hard to tell how long it would take a computer to solve it. At Convergys,
they threw Excel sheets and man power at the problem. Every week, supervisors would send
a worksheet to the transport department with the names of their team members, their shift
timings, addresses, contact numbers, and holidays for the following week. "When we started,
we had close to 100 supervisors, all of them sending different formats and versions of Excel.
Just sorting some of them was complex enough to qualify as an analytical question in a
GMAT exam," says Singh.

The transport team would then sort each employee by name, determine the area they lived in,
and attach them to a cab route. The roster took three days to prepare--every week--and once
done, it was frozen. That meant you couldn't change plans and that absenteeism lowered the
efficiency of the transport fleet. Worse, if an employee changed address or phone number, or
quit mid-week, cabs waited at the wrong address, while the Convergys help desk tried to
contact an employee--on a wrong number. To fix the problem, Singh figured he needed to get
the transport and the HR department on the same page, because HR was kept informed of all
changes relating to employees. So with the help of the transport team, he tasked his team to
create a HR-IS system and build their online rostering system on that platform.

"We realized that if we could link both systems together, the application could pull out
employee details from the HR's records directly," says Singh. When the team was done, their
work cut the time it took for supervisors to fill a sheet, and eliminated the problem of
employees who had quit or moved within Convergys.

The system also helped Convergys overcome another huge challenge: billing. Initially, after
every trip, cab drivers filled up a trip sheet with the number of kilometers they had run. To
decide how much a driver needed to be paid, the transport department needed to enter trip
data into their Excel sheets, cross it against the cost of hiring that specific vehicle (Indica,
Qualis, etcetera), and add on extra costs like over-time, or 24-hour rates."We automated that
function and built an application that had all the parameters and metrics pre-loaded into the
system. The system could give you costs by department and by employee. It brought down
the billing time significantly," says Singh. More importantly, the application cut roster-
making time from three days to one. And allowed the transport to adjust rosters on demand,
thereby improving cab utilization.

The Proper Route

The next step was to create the most optimal routes for cabbies. This isn't vital only because
it lowers the cost of running cabs, which charge by the kilometer, but also because, in an
industry that bills clients by time, it makes incredible sense. If a driver wasn't taking the most
optimal route--not necessarily the shortest one--employees clocked in late and that meant
money out of Convergys' top line. According to a 2006 report by Financial Express, between
20 and 25 percent of India's BPO workforce arrive at their office 30 minutes late--everyday.
Despite being a dated report, its findings give you an idea of the loss the industry incurs
annually from staff delays: A whopping Rs 380 crore. But how do you plan optimized routes
for 10,000 employees?

Singh bought an off-the-shelf routing solution which had 10-12 algorithms to do basic
routing. Then he roped in Eicher World Maps to get digital versions of their printed maps.
"We got the algorithm to work on those digital maps. Also we got all employees to geo-code
their locations," he says. In addition to layering the maps and the algorithms, Singh's team
added data including the availability of vehicles, cab capacities, and average speeds on
various roads, etcetera. This, now, allows Convergys to plan ahead and create the most
optimal route. Importantly, it also allows the transport department to work in a more real-time
fashion, increasing its efficiency. "Now when an employee's pick or drop is cancelled, we can
reshuffle routes and fill in the empty space in a cab," says Singh. "This allows us to reduce
the number of cabs by about 20 percent."

"The transport solution helped us reduce and optimize costs and provides a positive
experience for our employees, something which is of so much importance to us. It enables us
to manage the entire transport service chain from rostering, routing to billing, thereby
creating a seamless end-user and vendor experience," says Gaurav Kalra, head of transport,
Convergys. Overall, Singh says that a modest estimate of how much the project lowered
transport costs is 30 to 40 percent.

The Road Ahead

Revved up by their success, Singh's team began exploring ways to make the system more
user-friendly. "Attrition and constant hiring means that the system has to be intuitive enough
to not require any training at all," says Singh. So they introduced a host of self-service portals
to reduce the burden on the transport team. "We have also started the concept of SMS-based
workflow. By sending short codes such as "CP" for cancel pick up and "CD" for cancel drop,
employees could notify the transport team without having to talk to the call center or help
desk," says Singh. "The high level of automation has set a precedent in the industry," says
Kalra.
By building self-help portals where staffer can check their routes and pick-up time, Singh has
managed to considerably lower dependence on the helpdesk. Singh also experimented with
barcodes. Earlier, a guard standing at the gate kept a manual record of when cabs arrived.
This data was maintained just in case an employee came in late and wrongfully blamed a late
cab. Now, by assigning a barcode strip to each cab and trip sheet, Singh's made it possible for
the guard to scan both with a handheld scanner. Also, the arrival of specific cabs is flashed on
the respective supervisor's screen.

Singh is also exploring technologies like GPS to track cabs in real-time and, if possible,
divert them from areas of heavy traffic. It will also allow them to send SMSes to employees,
asking them to get ready when a cab reaches within a certain distance of a pickup point.
"There's so much to be done," says Singh.

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1. What were the problems faced by Ipininder Singh in the transport system of Convergys? (2
marks)

2. How does the HR-IS improve rostering? (3 marks)

3. How does the routing solution lower transport costs? (3 marks)

4. What are the various solutions implemented by Ipininder Singh to improve the transport
system at Convergys? (2 marks)