ANLY482 AY2017-18T2 Group13 Project Overview
Delays in order fulfillment can be very costly to a logistics company. Hence, Logistics Company XYZ makes it a point to address causes of delays with utmost importance. In the context of this company, processing and packaging are done according to the order requirements during ground operations of the company in which delays can be a result of worker or non-worker related reasons.
Processes can also be inevitably skilled labor intensive. Due to this nature, a single error in the fulfillment of a job is very costly and critical to the whole ground operation process. The company, hence, has made an extra effort to ensure their employees are well-equipped to manage risks and complete the job in an accurate, timely manner. This is currently done by training of onsite workers - after being identified their roles, they are required to undergo a number of training courses to be certified as competent to their assigned orders.
In this project, we will be exploring the reasons for the delay on work order pertaining to the effectiveness of the ground workforce in the company. The project will be broken down into 2 phases which can be described as the following:
| Phases | Description |
|---|---|
| Phase 1 | a. Identify key processes that are core to the business -
Key processes include activities that lies on critical paths thus they are key to the efficiency of the companies
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| Phases 2 | Using the insights and analysis generated from Phase 1, the team will be focusing on the following in Phase 2
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As mentioned above, order fulfillment is a key milestone in the company's business. However, the company experiences that the orders are sometimes delayed. There are different causes for delay and we divide those into three different categories based on the subject that actually caused delay: Worker, Order, Equipment. By looking at these different areas and analyzing data to gain critical insights, the company would be able to reduce disruptions to its ground operation and therefore to result in a successful fulfillment of the order to the client.
The main business question that this project aims to answer is what are the main causes of delays in order fulfillment due to worker. There are 120 different processes in which a delay could occur in. First, we identify the key processes that are core to the business, and identify the delays occurred in those key processes. The delays can vary with worker or non-worker related factors. In the case where the delays are caused by worker related factors, we analyze the training records of the employees, discover training trends within the company, for example, what training courses the workers lack in fulfilling the order requirement, what courses fail to equip the workers with required skill set, etc.
In this project, we hope to achieve the following objectives:
1. Study business model
2. Review existing models
3. Understand nature of data
4. Clean, explore, process data
5. Make discoveries/insights for Logistics Company XYZ to match employees to orders quickly
6. Propose recommendation to help the Human Resource department streamline employee skill sets that are relevant to the company
7. Create a centralized dashboard to reflect training status and key indexes for human development for optimized decision making within the human resource department
The main analysis is done with employee training data, from which our group discover training trends. This data is obtained from Terex, a software that contains employee training data and is managed by the company's Human Resources department.
As actual data has not been received, the Metadata will be updated accordingly on a later date. Nonetheless, the following is a list of data fields that the team will be expecting to receive from the company.
List of data required in order to identify critical processes with delays:
- List of 120 processes (Company could preselect more important processes)
- KPI of each processes
- Reasons KPI were not met (if data unavailable, study the data of the worker executing the job)
List of data required in order to identify training provided to the employee for the past 3 years and then to discover training trends:
- Employee training records (Historical, across 3 years)
- List of training courses required for worker to complete each process
Currently, the team will attempt to study the data with the following methods.
| Stage | Description | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Data cleaning | To remove incomplete and invalid records | In Progress |
| Data exploration | To study frequencies, distribution, outliers, general patterns of datasets | Not started |
