The Road Warrior and a Healthy Lifestyle

Meet Mr. Joe Travelalot. He is a road warrior. Works for a company in the Travel Transportation domain. Mr. Travelalot’s job takes him places far and wide. Sometimes within the domestic US and sometimes to destinations as exotic as Malta, Cape Town, Argentina.  The benefits of travelling to such places is not lost to Joe. It is one of the best parts about his job. However, along with the benefits of seeing new places, come the challenges of maintaining a healthy lifestyle while away from home turf.

In the past few years, there has been an increase in the importance of exercise and nutrition. Due to the rising percentage of chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart attack to name a couple, people all over the world are making an effort to gear towards working out on a regular basis and home cooked meals or raw fruits and vegetables. The significance of a well-conditioned lifestyle is not lost to a constant traveler.

The road warrior, more than most people, has to discipline himself even in Argentina (or wherever his work takes him) to find a way to mirror at least to some extent his exercise and food habits. So what are some of the effective exercises that one can implement on the go? And what can one eat so that the waistline stays intact (pun intended!)

Here are two exercises that are simple but 10-15 minutes of these are sure to pack a punch. The quintessential push-up.  This is a very effective exercise that works the upper body and the abs like no other. The form is simple. Space required very little. Best part, can be done anywhere, anytime. If you are in great shape, try a burpee. I specially love this exercise for the challenge it poses even in its simple design. It works the entire body and gets a sweat going within the first few reps.

Steps to do a Burpee: 1) Keep feet shoulder-width apart. Now, lower body into a squatting position, placing hands on the floor in front of you. 2) Kick your feet back so that you are in push-up position. Keep your hands firmly on the ground to support your body. 3) Lower your chest to do a push-up. Bring your chest back up.  4) Kick your feet back to their original position. Stand up, and then jump into the air while clapping your arms overhead. 5) Repeat.

Chew on this: Regardless of your exercise routine at home or away, it’s what you eat that makes or breaks the deal. Aim for the less processed foods on the menu when with a client for dinner or lunch. Try to eat fewer processed carbohydrates, look for steamed or sautéed vegetables, stick to leaner meats. And voila! You can be rest assured that your body will thank you for it later.

RTS’s own road warriors share their tips on what works for them: Raja Kasilingam suggests:  Avoid alcohol; eat protein bar and vitamins; stick to meals that are vegetarian and/or include  fish to the extent possible. Mukundh Parthasarathy agrees with the minimal or no alcohol policy. In addition, Mukundh hits the hotel gym at the first chance he gets and adds an extra 30 minutes to help him sleep better the first night.

There are many ways that a road warrior can attempt to maintain his health. The key point is consistency and discipline. One can find several valuable tools and tips on the internet and there are blogs dedicated to fitness and nutrition for consistent travelers. Here are a few (please note that RTS does not endorse these):

Travelandfitnessblog.com

Nerdfitness.com

Fittraveler.com

Are you a road warrior with tips on health and nutrition? What has been one of your favorite cities that has been conducive to a healthy lifestyle? We would love to hear your thoughts. Leave us a comment!

Charmi Ramchandani

Account Manager

Recruiting reinvented

“Recruitment”, “Staffing”, “Candidate sourcing”, "Headhunting" are just some of the popular terms that explain what a person whose job it is to match a job seeker with an appropriate position. There was a time when the “Recruiter” picked up the phone and made a cold call to a potential employer in the hopes of finding appropriate placement for the candidate and making a commission in the process. I recall my days of opening up the yellow pages and scanning down the companies listed and calling tirelessly till I got a lukewarm “maybe I’ll see your candidate next week”. Even then, there was a 100% chance of the meeting never happening – either the employer cancelling or the candidate being a “no show”.  Recruiters back then had to have the most positive outlook to handle the innumerable “NO”s before landing on a “YES”. Talk about personifying optimism! Still, I believe this tireless exercise built character and a thick skin and created some wonderful sales people.

The past few years have now changed the look of recruiting. It is no longer just plain old cold calling. In fact, no employer wants to hear a pre-written, impersonal script and more often than not, neither does a recruiting professional want to narrate it like a robot.  With LinkedIn and the other social media tools, the emphasis is more on relationship building at any level of positions. Be it executive level placement or technical level recruiting  or even seasonal staffing, a seasoned recruiter now has to step up his/her game to create relationships built on trust with employers. An employer (company) is more willing to engage with a recruiter or headhunter if there is an element of sincere interest and mutual trust in helping the employer and his company achieve its long term goals. A systematic strategy presented by the head hunter that reflects timely implementation and cost efficiencies is more likely to receive long term acceptance. I believe this is even more important with more and more companies outsourcing a lot of their jobs overseas. The reliance on a trust worthy professional who will hire candidates as if it were his/her own company is gaining a new level of significance in the travel and transportation vertical.

In keeping with the relationship building idea, we at Revenue Technology Services, seek to create an environment where a client is comfortable trusting us to provide decision support  solutions covering the areas of revenue management, pricing and scheduling as well as IT Services strategies to achieve their long term goals of profitability and cost efficiencies. We strive to network with our clients over social networking sites such as LinkedIn and attending trade shows as well as hosting our annual summit, with the understanding that relationships take time to develop and dedication to maintain. The one mantra that is never compromised upon is that our client’s success is our success.

As always, we love to hear your feedback and suggestions on our blog. Please feel free to leave us a comment!

Charmi Ramchandani

Account Manager

Achieving Success in Automation

Businesses today face a stark reality: anticipate, respond, and react to the growing demands of the market place or perish. This is even more pressing in our travel and transportation industry. In a fiercely competitive environment, business strategy not only determines success, it governs business survival. Now, more than ever, effective business strategy centers on aggressive, efficient use of information technology. But time and again, we see massive failures and delays of automation projects in spite of a comprehensive plan and thought put into those projects. Having been through quite a lot of successful and a few of not so successful automation projects, I thought it’s time to pen my thoughts on the things that have worked in our industry. Here are my top 10 list of things to look out for before embarking on an IT project:

1.       Success – Defining success and figuring out how to measure it is arguably the most important aspect before finalizing the business case for a large scale project. Too often, we assume that success is defined as on time, on budget, and meeting the defined requirements. The project may still be considered a failure if it doesn't deliver the expected business value.

2.       Process – Buy into the processes associated with the software just as much as the software itself. Expect and plan for process changes as you implement the software, rather than applying layers of metaphorical duct tape to a package in order to support a “my way or the highway” approach that has killed many a project. During the software sales cycle, the process and “way of doing things” that the software assumes are just as important as the pretty screens and fancy features. Thinking you can drastically modify one or the other is a recipe for disaster.

3.       Champion – It’s very important for key stakeholders to remain in those positions until the value of the project is delivered. As a plan B, a buy-in from second in line leaders is also important. When projects are 6 months and longer, when the key stake holders leave, in most cases if the next in line don’t buy the vision, the project could get delayed, scope creep and scrapped.

4.       Decisions – As a team, be prepared to make tough decisions that were unpopular with your team, manager or customer to keep the projects on time and budget. Be it finding the right resources for the right roles, business process changes, or communicating in advance.

5.       Customization – Whenever possible, take the system as is – get to know it, use it and document the deficiencies. The customizations are a lot more meaningful and this will also keep the scope creep in check. If budget is the issue, bank some hours for customizations as phase 2.

6.       Define –Sometimes, the people involved in a project—the project manager, team members, steering committee members and sponsor(s)—don't understand their roles and responsibilities because no one defines them. Oversight, setting expectations and asking questions are part and parcel of the equation. Examples of project managers (PM) not showing up for meetings, sponsors not asking questions on scope creep, subject matter experts (SME) in full time jobs not being able to focus on projects. Similarly, vendor resources are over stretched, PMs and SMEs

7.       Documentation – While thinking about customizations, try to enforce transparency into the system. Try to get as much as the functional specifications into online help or a knowledge base. Move away from soft copies of documents. Key to have milestones on online help or knowledge base within the system. Users keep moving on and its key to have a central repository of information.

8.       “‘Til death do us apart’” – May sound obvious, but too often, systems implementations fail, because end users are overwhelmed with information and do not understand the system. Retraining after a few months post cutover and time spent hand holding goes a long way adopting the new system.

9.       Test – Quality assurance efforts such as integration testing, black box testing, functional testing and stress testing often get short drift on projects. Sometimes customers get the test scripts from the vendor – that may not be a lot of help!!

10.   Risks – Risk management should be part of any level of planning, whether initial project planning or phase- or stage planning for each new portion of a project. All too often it’s done upfront and then not revisited. Along with the critical success path, have a Plan B if things were to go wrong.

I am sure you have your ‘top 10’ as well and drop me a line if you’d like to share it.

Mukundh Parthasarathy

VP, Cargo Product Management & Marketing

(R)evolutions?

Being a business discipline, Revenue Management is an implement once, seldom change approach, right? But then a blog post of a colleague referencing his childhood got me casting my mind back over my time in the airline industry in general, and RM in particular, and thinking about how things have changed.

Yes, the basic principles remain, that of trying to extract the highest price that we can from a particular passenger without scaring them away. However, how this is done has changed significantly. In the old days we had limited competition, very well fenced fares, and in some instances operating subsidies and a booming economy. We were allowed to overbook (within reason) with only limited penalties for getting it wrong. Travel was fairly predictable, the businessman didn’t mind paying for convenience, and all was well in our world.

Enter low cost competitors, multitudes of startup carriers, economic downturns followed by true blue recession, withdrawal of subsidies and government imposed performance penalties.

Over the years the landscape has changed dramatically. Systems have evolved to take advantage of newer technologies and calculations. The internet has raised passenger’s understanding of pricing mechanisms and given them the opportunity to comparison shop from their living room. Booking habits have become less predictable and passengers seem to be leaving it until later to book.

Thus the reflection. All these things happened over time. We meet each challenge, identifying changes and solutions, and add them to our toolkit. If I had to walk in somewhere now knowing only what I did in the early 90’s, I could not expect anyone to take me seriously. However, as with most things, experience counts. Between me and my colleagues we have all seen these changes, lived through these changes, and found competitive solutions over the years.

So remember this when it comes to addressing the business issue: while the basic concepts may seldom change, the people (and the experience of those people) whom you choose to assist in addressing your challenges can make all the difference between success and failure.

Jason Codd

VP, Services

Overbooking - Friend or Foe?

What is overbooking? Although the term sometimes evokes a negative emotion, it is a core component of effective revenue management whereby the bottom line is enhanced through maximizing utilization of available space. It is a practice that is widely prevalent in everyday life. For e.g.: Doctors sometimes overbook appointments to accommodate the possibility of some patients not showing up. Restaurants do the same for reserving tables and so on. In the transportation space, overbooking is the practice of selling more seats than capacity in order to compensate for no-shows and cancellations. Airlines typically indulge in this practice in order to minimize lost opportunity by selling seats that would have otherwise gone empty owing to passenger no show rates.

Overbooking practices are typically implemented only in economy cabins as denying boarding to a premium first or business cabin passenger who happen to be their most profitable customers is a risk that most airlines are not willing to take. Given the sensitive nature of overbooking and the prospect of dealing with potential denied boardings, overbooking levels are not set randomly by airlines and involves the usage of historical showup patterns along with sophisticated modeling techniques. These models have the objective of not only maximizing utilization and hence the load factor, but also minimizing the  risk of a denied boarding. Getting the overbooking number wrong typically results in potential revenue downside to airlines in the form of vouchers along with the intangible effect of creating passenger ill-will. In spite of these models, depending on the market and scheduling criteria, passengers denied boardings are not as rare as they should be.

Overbooking, when done the right way can boost airline revenues upto 2%. However, if mismanaged, it can lead to severe negative repercussions including one scene I witnessed at an airport where the overbooked passenger (who happened to be a police inspector) threatened to arrest the check-in agent for not letting him board the aircraft. When a flight is overbooked, airlines typically have voluntary oversales mechanisms which are set in motion where passengers are incentivized to give up their seat and be reaccommodated on alternate itineraries in exchange for a travel voucher.

Overbooking in the cruise ferry space is not as prevalent as in the airline space.  The concept of leaving passengers in the port due to lack of space on the cruise ferry is quite alien and rightfully so, given that the schedules and frequency of sailings tend to be relatively limited. Having said that, cruise ferries are realizing that there is significant revenue being left on the table by not overbooking to compensate for cancellations and no-shows. Even though overbooking at the ship level is a no-no, cruise ferries are considering overbooking certain types of cabins with the understanding that if everybody shows up for that cabin, then some may be upgraded/moved to similar cabin types.

Does your company overbook? If yes, what kind of challenges do you face? If not, is it something you are considering and trying to figure out how this could potentially improve the bottom line. If you need to discuss more about how overbooking could help your company, please don’t hesitate to contact me at Pradeep.bandla@rtscorp.com.

Pradeep Bandla

VP, Product Management and Marketing

Business Analytics.....Old wine in a new bottle?

I still remember the first day of my undergraduate class in ‘Introduction to Industrial Engineering’ back in 1975. As a young boy growing up in a town with open coal mine fields, power plants, and fertilizer plants, I was always fascinated by heavy machinery and wanted to be a mechanical engineer. All that changed completely right after I sat through my first lecture in Industrial Engineering. I was hooked on to it… forever. It was very simple—it just seemed to fit my personality. Industrial Engineering is about constantly finding ways to improve processes and systems. It is about optimizing the performance of people, processes, and systems.

As I continued to pursue my newly found interest, advanced courses and research on quantitative methods seemed to be the logical choice to get me prepared for the real world.  It is not surprising that I passionately love “Business Analytics” and its application to transportation and logistics. Business Analytics is no different than a combination of Industrial Engineering concepts and methods coupled with quantitative methods such as operations research and statistics. It is simply old wine in a new, attractive bottle: the best combination - looks pretty and tastes great.

Business Analytics (BA) refers to the skills, technologies, applications and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning (Beller, M.J.; Alan Barnett (2009-06-18). "Next Generation Business Analytics". Lightship Partners LLC). BA focuses on developing new insights and understanding business performance based on data and analytical methods and helps in better decision-making.

At Revenue Technology Services (RTS), we have the expertise, experience, and knowledge in Business Analytics for the Travel and Transportation industry. Business Analytics is at the core of everything we do at RTS. Our revenue management, pricing, and scheduling software solutions incorporate industry leading statistical forecasting models and network optimization models. We have successfully developed several advanced planning and operational systems using operations research based methodologies that have enabled our customers to make better decisions. Our people bring together a vast amount of expertise and experience in Business Analytics in terms of business knowledge, industry expertise, and IT which are the key components of our and our customers’ success.

Send us a note or give us a call. We will help you look for symptoms that need to be further researched in terms of causes and challenges and turn them into opportunities by analyzing your data, identifying your constraints, and recommending options.

Raja Kasilingam, Ph.D.

President

Socialization

The words “Social Media” conjure a collage of the most popular outlets available:  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Instagram, and Wordpress.  Companies in almost any industry cannot but maintain a presence on at least one of these sites for the endless benefits that have been proclaimed by many a social media expert. Ranging from social branding, to creating a global network, to generating leads, there is no doubt that social media is here to stay.

The question that arises to my mind is what would be an ideal tool from the social media treasure box? To make a case in point, let us take a look at a company like Revenue Technology Services that is very unique in its products and has a niche clientele.

“Revenue Technology Services (RTS) is a worldwide provider of profit enhancing revenue management and pricing software solutions for passenger and cargo transportation industries. Our offerings, aimed at the Airline, Cruise Ferry, Rail and Coach verticals include software solutions, consulting and education services, operations research capabilities, technology services and IT development support.”

The uniqueness of RTS’s products and clientele makes a case in point that companies such as these need to maintain an even more active presence to create an awareness of their business so that even if a follower on LinkedIn or Twitter may not necessarily fit the company’s description of an ideal client, they can tap into their network to help RTS reach its goal of lead generation. Most of RTS’s effective social media marketing has occurred through the professional network LinkedIn. Through this professional network, RTS has managed to grow its connections and reach potential clients all over the world by leveraging LinkedIn’s vast array of professionals.

The weekly blogs posted on LinkedIn are another effective tool to create a readership. RTS aims at establishing credibility as an informative contributor to social media world. They provide an effective outlet to talk about the company’s experience, opinions and ideas relating to the Travel & Transportation industry. The weekly blogs that are posted on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook have helped create a buzz around the company. While companies such as RTS need to work harder at maintaining their presence due to the sheer nature of its business, there is no denying that consistency will lead to brand awareness and eventually to lead generation. RTS highly values its followers comments with much respect and makes every attempt to provide timely feedback from their resident SME’s – our ultimate goal being improved products and services.

Is your company in a niche industry like RTS? What are your effective social media tools? Drop us a line in the comments section and connect with us on LinkedIn or follow us @RTSProfitOpt. 

Charmi Ramchandani

Account Manager