BARIA PLANNING SOLUTIONS GROUP 8

30 SEPTEMBER 2014

BARIA PLANNING
SOLUTIONS CASE
ANALYSIS GROUP - 8
1.
What are the organizational and operational issues that underlie the problems
facing Baria Planning Solutions (BPS)?
Problems faced by BPS solutions:
BPS project win rate for new sales, renewal,
and pilot projects has reduced by 2%, 6.25%
and 3% respectively when compared to the
projected win rates. This negative impact on
the performance of the company is been
attributed to the delays incurred by the sales
support group of the company. The

Page
1

TEAM MEMBERS: C GAURAV

GOKUL RAM K
NIRANJAN J
K BHAGYARAJ
SHAILENDER
KUMAR
USHA B

BARIA PLANNING SOLUTIONS GROUP 8

underlying reasons behind this problem could be grouped in to organizational and
operational as below.
1. Organizational issues:
1.1 Sales team and proposal deadlines:
BPS provides procurement optimization solutions for four different industry sectors
Energy, Government, Manufacturing and Retail. This has made the organization to divide
the proposal support team of the sales support division into above four industry specific
units. The sales people were not able to get the timely assistance from this
proposal support team and because of this the sales people were failing to meet the
proposal deadlines. This made the customers to switch to other competitors. This will
have a negative impact on the organization revenue for the next 2 years.
1.2 Cross training difficulty:
The sales support team has four functions Data analysis, Data engineering, Proposal
support and Pricing. The man power from the Data analysis and data engineering team of
the support group cannot be trained to work in the proposal support team. This difficulty
in cross training has created difficulties in
sharing the work load with in the sales
support group. Experts were needed to work for the sales support group; this has also
made it impossible for other units (data analysis, data engineering, pricing) to share its
work load incase if the number of requests are very high.
1.3 Absence of synergy across the sales and sales support:
Head of sales has repeatedly emphasized the need to shift the sales support division to a
more industry centric structure. These inconveniences had led to lack of synergy between
sales and sales support team
2. Operational Issues:
Variable input of works from various sectors in different time
periods.
The projects arise randomly in different quarters. It is not possible to
predict the number of projects in advance. This has led to inter arrival variability
among the projects (Refer table). This table as calculated shows the
standard deviation in the arrival of projects for various functions. This
shows that there is an inter arrival variability
The order processing times for various processes are different. This
has led to uneven Order wait time (Refer table in hrs.) for various
processes. This calculated table tells that the waiting time for Proposal
support is very high whereas for pricing is too low. So processes are
not stream lined.

2. Suppose you walk into BPS one day, and find that the average work in process
of sales requests is 100. What would be your estimate of the turn-around time
Page
2

(Manufacturing Lead Time) for a new Sales Support request in Retail Sector,
based on the information given in the case?
As per status quo, the total inventory (no. of requests under process) at any instant in the
system is 15.82. The breakup of inventory per activity alongwith its total process time
(Request process time+ Wait time) is :

Activity

Reques
t
Process
Time
(in hr)

Reques
t wait
time
(hr)

Total
time
spent in
process
(hr)

No. of
Request
s in
process

2.45

4.12

6.57

76

No. of
Request
s in
Queue
(Ii)

Total
Inventor
y
(Request
s in
process
and
waiting)

1.27

2.03

1.42

2.22

1.45

2.27

1.07

1.70

2.11

2.87

3.04

3.88

0.18

0.86

Full Year 2010

0.
1-Data Engineering

0.
2-Data Analysis
3-Proposal Support

2.57

4.60

7.17

79

10.58

18.97

29.55

81

0.
Energy Sector

0.
Government Sector

10.58

18.13

28.71

63
0.

Manufacturing Sector
Retail and Other
Sectors

6.35

17.60

23.95

76
0.

15.87

56.85

72.73

85
0.

4 - Pricing
TOTAL
15.82

2.19

0.59

2.78

68

Extrapolating the inventory from 15.82 requests to 100 requests in the same proportion
as per the above table, we get the parameters for different activities as below:

Activity
Full Year 2010
1-Data Engineering
2-Data Analysis
3-Proposal Support
Energy Sector
Government Sector
Manufacturing Sector
Retail and Other Sectors
4 Pricing

No. of
Requests in
process

No. of
Requests in
Queue (Ii)

Total Inventory
(Requests in
process and
waiting)

4.79
5.02

8.05
8.98

12.83
14.00

5.13
3.95
4.81
5.36
4.28

9.19
6.77
13.33
19.19
1.16

14.32
10.72
18.14
24.55
5.43

Page
3

BARIA PLANNING SOLUTIONS GROUP 8

TOTAL
33.33
66.67
100.0
From the above tables we can see that at this stage the time taken to come out of the
system by the first request in data engineering stage through the channel for retail sector
= 2.45 (data engg. process time) + 7.17 (total data analysis time) + 72.73 (retail
proposal total time) + 2.78 (total time for pricing process) = 82.68 hour. After this, every
following request will come out of the system after every 72.73 hr. (the time required for
the retail proposal is the largest, making it the bottleneck activity).
Total time required for 12.83 requests in data engineering stage to get processed and
come out of the system= 82.68+11.83*72.73 = 943 hr.
So, the total lead time for a new sales support request in the retail sector is 943+72.73 =
1015.73 hr.

3. What alternatives are available for dealing with the problems in the Sales
Support group? How did you evaluate the alternatives? What actions should
Christy Connor propose to Brandon Ali?
Status Quo :
In the status quo, we analyzed the various
factors like Request process time, avg
request inter arrival time, capacity per year,
through put, capacity utilization, request wait
time, total process time etc. (Refer
Annexure 1). Then we realized the bottle
neck was created in the waiting time of each
request to be processed. This was almost
around 24.82 hours (Wt avg of 18.97, 18.13,
17.60, 56.85). Hence the various alternatives
were evaluated based on Request Wait time
primarily.
The various alternatives that we have got are
:

1. Cross Training (Dropping industry focused approach for sale support

team)
2. Fully Industry Centric organization
3. Reorganizing proposal support by type of sales

Option 1: Cross Training

In this option, all the employees in proposal support are cross trained so that any
employee can be given any project and the entire team becomes a consolidated one. The
Page
4

biggest advantage of this option is the substantial decrease in the request wait time,
which was almost 6.44 hours in the proposal support stage (Refer Annexure 2). The
cost incurred to do the cross training will be $6058 approx (=(105000/52)*3)
Limitations:

Team members need to remain in each role for 3 months at the least to stay
effective
USP of BPS by offering individual expertise in every industry is lost. Team members
become generalists from being experts in one particular sector.
Option 2: Industry Centric Organization
The various functions of the sales flow including
data engineering and data analysis get divided on
basis of the industry so that the sense of
ownership will increase inside a single industry.
Dedicated resources are expected to focus on the
priority issues and expedite them. But from the
Annexure 3 we can see that the request wait
time for each industry while drawing sales
proposals will still remain high at 18.97 hours for
Energy sector and it reaches a maximum of 56
hours for the retail sector. Significant reduction is
seen in the request wait time for the Data
engineering, analysis and pricing phases.
Limitations:

Significant increase in manpower is required adding to costs

It does not address the constraint in the organization which is faster sales proposal

Option 3: Reorganizing proposal support by type of sales

Page
5

BARIA PLANNING SOLUTIONS GROUP 8

This option explores the opportunity of dividing
the proposal team based on the kind of project
they receive as shown in the figure. This mandates
that the team has to be cross trained across
industries and akin to option 1 the industry
expertise gets diluted here too. We will have to
hire more people for the new sales team as their
workload becomes 169% (refer annexure 4).
This option does result in significant reduction in
the request wait time as shown in the annexure 4.
Limitations:

USP of BPS by offering individual expertise

in every industry is lost. Team members
become generalists from being experts in one particular sector.
Need to mandatorily hire manpower for new sales team.

Proposed Solution:
Based on the 3 options listed above, we are proposing that BPS should go for Option 1 of
Cross training the sales support team and dissolve the industry focus structure as it
results in the maximum reduction of the request wait time. The cost of cross training is
also less. Even though the firm might lose out on the USP of individual expertise in each
industry, the revenues and turnaround time for each project will reduce. This will result in
the firm remaining competitive. One major constraint that the firm needs to watch out for
is that since people working in each industry of the proposal team hail from different
firms, the team dynamics need to be cultivated with care. Further Steps

Hire 3 more heads (refer annexure 2) for further reduction in the request wait
time from 6.44 hours to 3.61 hours.
Streamline the solution selling process by training and coming up with generic
frameworks for faster turnaround time. It will also reduce the standard deviation
for processing requests

Page
6