Disruptive Innovation in Singaporean Taxi Industry †Free Samples

Question: Discuss about the Disruptive Innovation in Singaporean Taxi Industry. Answer: Introduction: Information about ComfortDelgro ComfortDelgro Corporation is a public limited company, which has its head office in Singapore and listed on the Singapore Exchange. The products of the company are facilities like bus, cab, insurance and outdoor advertising. ComfortDelgro has expanded its business into China, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia. Comfort Transport Limited is the subsidiary of ComfortDelgro and led by its CEO and directors. The vision of the company is to emerge as the leading provider of land transport services. The mission of the company is to provide round the clock service to passengers accompanied by skilful and dedicated drivers (comfortdelgro.com.sg, 2017). Information about the cab industry: The cab industry is an international industry providing round the clock pickup and drop facilities to passengers. The size of the market of this public transport facility is worth billions of dollars and employ millions of drivers all over the world. The service is particularly popular in markets like Singapore. The taxi market in Singapore consists of both taxis available on road, which do not require prior booking, and the ones operated by companies like Uber, which require prior booking. The drivers operating in the taxi markets need to acquire government license. The taxi market in Singapore is currently under the domination of Uber and Grab which is giving the Singaporean companies like ComfortDelgro tough competition (todayonline.com, 2017). Identification of business goals: The business goals of ComfortDelgro Corporation are to provide high quality taxi hiring services to the customers at their convenience and to maximise the capital the shareholders. The multinational vehicles hire leasing company seeks to foster an environment of sustainability by operating in more sustainable ways to ensure benefit of the entire community. It also keeps on conducting continuous study to gain knowledge about the growing needs of the consumers. Fulfilling of this business goal would help the company to offer more customer oriented products, which would in turn help the company to achieve its first business goal, providing better services to customers. Provision of excellent hire cab services would allow the cab company to achieve its second goal, causing capital maximisation for its shareholders (Farahani, et al., 2014). An analysis of the aim of ComfortDelgro shows that its aim is to analyse the training needs of its cab drivers and provide them with training. The aim is specific and the managers can analyse the training needs using methods like survey and interview. The training needs can be measured by monitoring the number of customer complaints and through methods like surveys and interviews. The responsibility of monitoring the cab drivers performances to recognise their training needs can be assigned to specific managers. Thus, the responsibility of assessing training needs can be assigned and is hence assignable. The aim of the company to analyse the training needs of the employee drivers is realistic. This aim can be achieved within a fixed time period. This discussion of the training need analysis of the drivers of ComfortDelgro shows that its aim is specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time specific. Organisational training needs and SMART objectives: An analysis of the case study given shows that the emergence of personalised cab hire services have brought about fall in the demand for the public cab hire service providers. The multinational online can hire services like Uber provide personalised pickup and drop services. Their drivers are trained to operate new technology like general packet radio services (GPRS) to receive orders from the passengers and are well groomed. As a result they customer friendly conduct help in maximising customer satisfaction and earn these companies repeat business and high revenue. They should have detailed knowledge about the GPRS systems and roads and streets. The above discussion clearly point that the taxi companies who provide taxi services need to train their drivers to develop necessary skills like communication skills and technical skills to maximise customer satisfaction and profit, the first two business goals of the company. This situation calls for analysis of the training needs of the d rivers (Goetsch Davis, 2014). ComfortDelgro should analyse the training needs of the employees like drivers to ensure that they are aligned to the business goals of the company. The senior managers of ComfortDelgro can recognise the training needs of the drivers using the several analysis methods. The first method, which themanagement can use to recognise the training needs, is survey (Landy Conte, 2016). Themanagement can conduct surveys among the drivers to know about the degree of the technological knowledge and expertise. The managers would be able to recognise the areas where the drivers would require training like improvements in the expertise to operate GPRS. The second method the managers can use to recognise the training needs of the subordinates is observation. They can observe the employees work and point out their faults and defects in work. This would allow them to point out the areas where the drivers are weak and develop training plans to train in those areas. The third training need analysing met hod, which ComfortDelgro management can use, is interview. The managers and the HR can interview the drivers to know about their career goal and areas where they need training. The customer feedbacks would function as the fourth method. These methods would enable themanagement of ComfortDelgro to plan training sessions to improve the competencies and skills of the drivers to serve customers better. This would enable the taxi company to maximise customer satisfaction and earn huge revenue, two of its important business goals. Thus, the training needs should enable to drivers to achieve higher level of perform which would enable the company to realise its business goals. The managers and the human resource department must monitor the performances of the drivers to recognise any new training needs (Sung Choi, 2014). Task(functional) analysis: The managers and the human resource department should apply the four methods to analyse the training needs of the employees namely, survey, interview, customer feedback and observation. These four methods should be employed on regular basis to recognise any new area that may require training of the drivers. For example, if a new technology to book cabs or drive cars emerges in the taxi industry, the company should provide training to the drivers in these new ways. This will ensure that the drivers keep on providing services to the customers and maximise customer satisfaction. They would be able to create a pool of loyal customers who would use the services of ComfortDelgro and generate high revenue for the company, thus achieving its business goals (Neuendorf, 2016). Individual training needs analysis: The functional area recognised in the study would be drivers and the task would be providing cab services to the employees. Themanagement on regular basis must analyse the tasks allocated to employees according to their functional areas. For example, the managers should check the feedback the passengers give regarding the quality of service and riding experience on the official website. Positive feedbacks would indicate increasing efficiency of the drivers. Several low rating feedbacks would show that the driver needs to be trained. The managers on continuous basis analyse these feedbacks and combine them with other training need analysis methods like interview and surveys. This would allow them to recognise newly emerging training needs of the drivers and keep their efficiency level at par with the business needs of the company (Sumner et al., 2014). Identification of intended learning outcomes: The managers must identify the outcome of the training need analysis and the training session the company would provide the drivers. They must observe the performance of the drivers from the customer feedbacks like ratings on the official websites. The managers can interview the drivers to know about the problems they are facing while providing services to the customers to point out the areas where these drivers require developing. Then, based on the findings of these training needs analysis, the managers can plan the training schedule. The appropriate training sessions to improve the efficiency of the drivers would be the outcome of the training need analysis of the managers (Qu et al., 2014). Conclusion: The in-depth discussion conducted above point out that the cab companies require to undergo great deal of innovation like they should capable of taking online orders. The companies like Comfort should analyse the training needs of their drivers and provide them training to improve their technical knowledge like ability to respond to online orders from passengers. They should be groomed to satisfy the needs of the passengers. This would allow them to serve the passengers better to ensure high customer satisfaction and earn high revenue. Thus, finally it can be concluded that training the drivers would help them enable the company realise its business goals (Porter, 2014). References: ComfortDelGro Corporation Limited. (2017).Comfortdelgro.com.sg. Retrieved 9 November 2017, from https://www.comfortdelgro.com.sg/board-and-management.aspx?id=80 Coping with technological disruption in the taxi industry. (2017).TODAYonline. Retrieved 9 November 2017, from https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/coping-technological-disruption-taxi-industry Farahani, R. Z., Rezapour, S., Drezner, T., Fallah, S. (2014). Competitive supply chain network design: An overview of classifications, models, solution techniques and applications.Omega,45, 92-118. Goetsch, D. L., Davis, S. B. (2014).Quality management for organizational excellence. Upper Saddle River, NJ: pearson. Landy, F. J., Conte, J. M. (2016).Work in the 21st Century, Binder Ready Version: An Introduction to Industrial and Organizational Psychology. John Wiley Sons. Neuendorf, K. A. (2016).The content analysis guidebook. Sage. Porter, G. (2014). Transport services and their impact on poverty and growth in rural sub-Saharan Africa: A review of recent research and future research needs.Transport reviews,34(1), 25-45. Qu, M., Zhu, H., Liu, J., Liu, G., Xiong, H. (2014, August). A cost-effective recommender system for taxi drivers. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 45-54). ACM. Sumner, S. A., Pallangyo, A. J., Reddy, E. A., Maro, V., Pence, B. W., Lynch, C., ... Thielman, N. M. (2014). Effect of free distribution of safety equipment on usage among motorcycletaxi drivers in TanzaniaA cluster randomised controlled trial.Injury,45(11), 1681-1686. Sung, S. Y., Choi, J. N. (2014). Do organizations spend wisely on employees? Effects of training and development investments on learning and innovation in organizations.Journal of organizational behavior,35(3), 393-412.