BUSINESS ANALYST INTERN ASSIGNMENT-HEADOUT

Snigdha Nagpal

The current average handling time to deliver one experience is 185mins.

The tasks required to deliver one experience can be split into –

 Value Added
 Non-Value Added but necessary
 Non-value Added

For this case, we can safely assume the 185mins are only value-added time.
Current cycle is almost 50 days long which is roughly 30000 mins assuming a 10-hour workday.

Hence, Current Efficiency is 185/30000= 0.0061 or 0.61%

Our goal is to increase the efficiency by reducing time taken to complete Non-Value Added tasks and
building a process which eliminates Waste thereby reducing the cycle time.

Suggested Process
 Suggested Optimisations:
 Website and App data should be analysed to pick up destinations and themes that attract the most business
and traffic and a business plan should be devised keeping in the customer’s wants which dictates areas of
growth for the next 9 months.
Eg. The experiences under different themes for destinations that already have a high traffic rate can be
prioritized to be delivered first or the destinations which have a low traffic rate because of lesser experiences
but have high business potential because of destination uniqueness can be targeted and prioritized.

Suggestions to remove wasted time:

 Setting Deadlines for every task in every experience thereby to reduce idle waiting time between tasks.
 BD should not Onboard partners and experiences that do not align with Customer wants and only increase
the number of listings this will lead in over production.
 Reducing the current backlog and preventing backlog as much as possible. Also maintaining availability and
best prices only for experiences which are in high demand as per season or destination to avoid maintaining
an inventory more than required.
 Creating and maintaining Standardised Content Guides to decrease the time taken by content, catalogue and
media teams to furnish details for every experience.

Suggestions to reduce time for Necessary tasks

 An auto prioritization system should be installed after the partner uploads the details on the extranet which
automatically prioritizes the experience depending on various factors such as destination, category of
experience, partner experience, etc from data of current live experiences.
 Content, media, catalogue teams work consecutively instead of linearly.
 The partner should be encouraged to provide complete details such description, highlights,
inclusions/exclusions etc. A filter which auto filters experiences with incomplete details and requests the
partner to add more details should be put in place. This will ensure incomplete listings are filtered out
thereby decreasing workload of catalogue, content and media teams.
Encouraging the partner to list the experience elaborately will help content, media and catalogue teams
update details quicker thereby decreasing their handling time.
 QA team should check details at every step instead of at the end so that errors can be detected and
prevented at the earliest and prevent further processing for wrong details.
 After BD and Partner approval the experience should automatically become live on the website.

Other suggestions to improve performance

 Quarterly employee performance reviews should be done, and managers should ensure all employees
capabilities are put to correct use.
 Employee productivity performance should be monitored, and bonuses/incentives should be put in place, if
possible, to increase morale and productivity.
 Proper employee mentoring and experienced project managers to ensure projects are completed on time
and no time is wasted by employees in uncertainty. This will also ensure all projects are completed on time
to deliver desired outcomes and within budget.

Step (in sequence from top to bottom) Average Handling Time Cycle Time
 BD team Onboards the partner T

Partner lists experience on extranet 20 mins T+4

BD team sets the priority for the experience listed by the 2 mins T+5
partner

Catalogue picks Content updates Media updates the 20 mins 40 mins 10 mins T+10
up the listing details image/video files
based on the
priority assigned

QAer checks the details 30 mins T+14

Review by Partner and BD T+15

Experience goes live on Headout T+15

Total 122 mins 15 days

Metrics to increase accountability and leakages within the system

 Efficiency – Measure how quickly a task can be done with accuracy with the least amount of
resources.

Efficiency = production time / total process time

 Cycle Time- The amount of time it takes to complete the entire length of a process from beginning to
end. Smaller cycles usually result in higher efficiency.

 Takt Time - Measurement of the amount of time it takes to finish producing one unit before making
the next.

 Error Percentage - Error rate, also known as failure rate or defect rate, measures the number of
errors made throughout an entire production cycle. 
Error rate = total units produced / total number of errors

 Timeliness - measures if you're able to complete the process within a pre-defined time frame.
Determine how productive and efficient your process must be to meet that deadline.

These are some of the many metrics that can be put in place to increase accountability and monitor
leakages.

Key Takeaway

The total size of time required to deliver 10000 experiences with the current process is approximately
12.5 to 13 years i.e. roughly 585 experiences in 9 months.

After optimisation of this process and completing the cycle time in 15 days and assuming time to perform
value added tasks will improve by some measure too

Efficiency is 122/9000= 0.13 or 13.5%

Average handling time per experience to deliver 10000 experiences in 9 months assuming 5 workdays a
week is 11 mins.

After optimisation of this process the average handling time for value added tasks comes down to 122
mins which results in 885 experiences in 9 months resulting in an increase of 33% but only reaching 9%
 of the goal.

Logistics and Automation

 Auto prioritisation system to reduce time taken by BD
 Filter out incomplete experiences sent by partners
 Automatic experience upload after BD and Partner Review
 Employee productivity and performance trackers

Assumptions
 All 10000 targeted experiences are in line with the customer’s demands and wants.
 The whole team is working for 10 hours a day, 20 days a month for 9 months.
 All experiences are passing the QA check in the first go.
 There are no resources to increase staff strength.
 The handling time given is the time required for the whole team to complete the task and not the time
required by 1 person.