GR2 - Designs

Scenario

It is the third Monday in March and Phyllis is going on a sales trip the next day. She is based in Boston and is going to visit offices at 6 places in 3 days, and wants to be back by Thursday evening. She sells cloud computing services and is the account manager responsible for all regions in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. She is going to different companies and targeting specific industries. The 6 places she has to go on the current trip includes New York City, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Pittsburg, PA, Hartford, CT, Albany, NY, Atlantic City, NJ.

Phyllis has one main goal on this trip: make sales. Any way she can save time in other activities to achieve that goal would be in her interest.

Main goal: Maximize sales
Secondary Goals:
- Minimize
  - Total time away from Boston.
  - Total time not spent in meetings
  - Total time spent planning the trip
  - Total time waiting for expense reimbursement
- Subject to
  - Getting to meetings on time
  - Getting a reasonable amount of rest

Our product will focus on helping Phyllis minimize the total time spent traveling, planning, and getting reimbursed for the trip.

She is driving her own car, and wants to stay two nights on the road. She has already spoken with her manager, Mary, and gotten her vocal blessing for going on the trip. Specifically, she’s planning on going to:

Boston
Albany
Fishkill (Stay the night)
Philadelphia
Atlantic City (Stay the night)
New York NY
Hartford
Return to Boston Late Night

She doesn’t want to book her own hotels. Andy (her assistant) will take care of hotels subject to her final itinerary.

On Monday afternoon around 2 PM, Phyllis creates her trip using the Mileage Manager application:

She logs into the Mileage Manager web application
She inputs (using a GUI)
1. Starting date/time for trip
2. Preferred times for hotel check-in
3. Clients to visit (Choose from clients in the system or connect to CRM) and preferred times for those meetings (if any)
4. Ending date/time for trip
She then asks Mileage Manager to generate a suggested trip. It outputs suggested times for her meetings and also a Google map with suggested routes given certain configuration parameters she has set in her personal settings.
She calls her clients and asks them to confirm meeting times based on what she would like to see happen.
She then edits or revises the suggestions in the system (either route or times)
After revising her trip, she saves it in the system and logs out.

Mary then leaves the next day to go on the trip. She has a great trip, she sells lots of her product and she even had an unexpected meeting with a favorite client in Providence pop up at the last minute on Thursday, requiring her to drive from Hartford to Providence. She does not go into the office on Friday morning because she wants to take her three children to school, so she submits her final mileage expense request from home:

She logs into the Mileage Manager web application
She updates her trip to reflect actual driving experience by adding a leg from Hartford to Providence and from Providence to Boston.
She reads her final tally for expected reimbursement based on mileage rates
She submits her trip expenses to her manager for approval (which includes her mileage)

On Friday afternoon, her manager, Mary, reviews expenses from the previous week in a batch because she has to sign off on the expenses coming from her direct reports. Part of her review includes mileage. For her review task she will:

Log into the Mileage Manager web application
View a queue of 12 expense reimbursement requests from her direct reports
Review each report very quickly at a high level (1 minute or less each), generally only looking for unusually high expenses. Mileage Manager may help her detect unexpectedly high mileage requests versus what was predicted.
Phyllis’ trip is in her batch, and she notices that her expenses were more than initially predicted. She requests details from the system on Phyllis’ actual trip, sees that she went to Providence after Hartford, and knowing that it was a valid change, she approves the trip for reimbursement.
She views her travel budget based on her most recent approvals to see if they may need to cut back on travel to hit their monthly target.

The same week, Juan the Auditor is doing his quarterly travel expense review for the firm. In particular, the finance department head suspects the firm is spending more on trips in the 1^st quarter than they really need to spend and wants Juan to check it out. He decides to do some analysis on historical data including the last 3 months of sales trips, looking for any abnormalities. He has been with the firm for some time, and he prefers to use Excel for his analyses. Therefore, his tasks will be to:

Log into the Mileage Manager application
Query the application to create a report of all trips made in the last three months
Export the results to an Excel readable file
Log out of the Mileage manager system
Analyze the results “offline”
Flag any suspect trips in the system for follow-up with sales managers
Create a quarterly report in Powerpoint for the Finance department head.