Executive Summary
This report provides the details of a proposal made by Loyola Institute of Training and Education, where they have recommended the name of our organization for a three months internship of their final year candidates. In order to understand the validity of the proposal, a VOS1 is performed and we have evaluated the same from Cost, Time, Resource Management and Operations perspective.
The proposal offers a good two way interaction between the training and development function of both the organizations. The cost analysis has resulted in an inference where equipment cost is a non value add and is recommended to be recovered from the proposing organization. Based on the various factors that have been analyzed as a part of this investigation, the proposal seems beneficial to both the organizations and must be approached post implementing the recommendations listed.
Loyola Institute is one of the leading soft skills and customer service training institutes, with over 11 centres across the Employees they deliver training to 7 different language speaking trainees and is operation with about 1000 employees. Loyola Institute provides industrial training to its trainees and approaches Tier one organizations in order to provide the best experience to the students studying in various short and long terms courses from their institute.
Loyola Institute believes that SigmaBIZ Capital Solutions, is a very customer centric organization and has been analyzing our VOC (voice of customer), in order to assess our capabilities related to training and development, operations and customer service. Loyola Institute has mentioned that we being a business service and sales organization can really help to demonstrate the real business environment to their students and help them gain professional experience and training.
Term and Capacity
In order to ensure that we are not overloaded with the training responsibility, only fifteen candidates will be a part of the training program and the term of training will be three months. All these trainees are from the final semester of Advanced Customer Service and Soft Skills course and have already attained two months professional training in there previous semester.
Preparations and Logistics
All the necessary preparations related to travel and stay will be done by the Loyola Institute and all the students who will become a part of this program will be a responsibility of the Institute and the same will be given in writing if the proposal is accepted.
Training and Development
The Institute respects any decision taken by us, related to the content and duration of the training however the institute requests that only 1/3rd of the period should be spent in training and the rest of the time should be used to allow the trainees to take part in live operations.
The above mentioned details are sent for evaluation and the same will be replied according to the availability of resources and operational bandwidth as analyzed in the coming sections of this report.
Cost and Benifit Analysis
A cost and benefit analyses is done to understand the cost that we will incur due to the training of unplanned resources and we will also see that what kind of benefit will we draw from the same.
Cost Analysis
In order to calculate the total cost incurred in this program, we need to find of the individual costs of various activities and a summation of all those will give us an approximate final amount.
Training Cost – Non-production training will take place for four weeks where 1 trainer will be regularly engaged and the cost of this activity can be taken as $2000.00
Equipments – Equipments used during training will be leased, considering the fact that the number of 15 production FTEs will be temporary and the equipments (Desktops, Headsets and Call Master) will be unused after three months. Total cost ($3000+$350+$1500 = $4850.00)
Transportation – Considering the production office outside the city, the participating students will be taking the company transport during the training period which will incur $1000.00
Total Cost Incurred during the training (no production) period is $7850.00
Benefit Analysis
Mentioned below are a few advantages of this program and related information.[ CITATION Bos07 \l 1033 ]
Language Skills – This program will add new languages to our customer service department as there will be candidates coming from different geographies and this can really help us to analyze the concept of a multiple language contact centre solution.
Knowledge Exchange – There will a lot of knowledge sharing that will take place between our training team and the participating trainees which will improve the level of our training.
Production Profits – The trainees will be sponsored by Loyola College and hence no stipend will be payable to them, the revenue generated by them for about two months will help us to recover any other variable costs and also earn profit.
Market recognition – Loyola Institute has planned to provide a benefit to the organization helping with the internship by marketing their services during the placement campaigns.
Method & Operations Plan
Based on the proposal sent by Loyola Institute, mentioned below is the methodology of execution and plan of operation for the proposal.
Training and Production
Venture Opportunity Screening is done in order to find out the validity of this proposal and we can say that considering that the training period for customer service product training is one months, there will be 15 candidates who will be giving us production for eight hours each for two months (44 working days), hence we will be getting a production of 352 hours in order to balance the cost incurred. [ CITATION Hin02 \l 1033 ]
In order to ensure that there is no duplication of resources for training, the participants joining for internship will receive their training along with the new hires from SigmaBiz Capital Solution and this will help us to use the same training resources in order to give the training to both the teams, more over in the long terms it will also help us to compare the performance level of our new hires and the internship candidates. [ CITATION Sey04 \l 1033 ]
Recommendations
Loyola Institute will be asked to bear the cost of equipment lease as this will be a purely non-recoverable cost and therefore the institute must bear this cost.
One of the trainers from the Institute must join the group of candidates as this will help us in knowledge sharing and the new joiners will get an opportunity to learn from soft skill perspectives as well.
Limitations
Since the training batch including the internship participants will be relatively huge, it may cause a distraction to the other full time trainees and may result in performance issues during production.
Conclusion
This proposal includes some very interesting and mutually beneficial objectives, such as knowledge sharing however the candidates participating in the program will be in a non-production environment for about a month and the only period when they will be on productions is for two months. There are various other cost based aspects that may impact a decision in the favour of this proposal however they can be controlled, if a few recommended suggestions are implemented.
As discussed and analyzed in the above sections, this proposal needs a proper planning in order to ensure that the normal operation is not impacted by an external initiative, hence if the plan of action as discussed above gets implemented, the proposal can be expected to deliver positive results for both the organizations.
Works Cited
Bosilj-Vuksi, V., Ceric, V., & Hlupic, V. (2007). Criteria for the Evaluation of Business Process. Interdisciplinary Journal of Information, Knowledge, and Management Volume 2 , 74-88.
Hindle, K. (2002). A CRITICAL EVALUATION OF THE STANDARDISATION POTENTIAL OF BUSINESS PLAN EVALUATION AIDS (BPEA) USED IN VENTURE CAPITAL INVESTMENT DECISION-MAKING. Hawthorn: Swinburne University of Technology.
McDonald, J., Coulthard, M., & Lange, P. d. (2005). PLANNING FOR A SUCCESSFUL MERGER OR ACQUISITION: LESSONS FROM AN AUSTRALIAN STUDY. ©Journal of Global Business and Technology Volume 1, Number 2 , 1-9.
Seymour, V., Jha, A., & Sima, S. (2004). Evaluation of the Development Gateway Final Report. London: London School of Economics .
