Yamato Transport: Part-time Employment of Housewives
Case Analysis
Yamato Transport Company is a courier service that has been growing at a steady rate since the last century. This company owes its success to its carefully planned and efficient delivery system with a competent workforce. With the closing of the 2011 financial year, the company celebrated a three percent growth rate in revenue and had increased its market share to forty-two percent. Part of these achievements of this company was made possible by a specialized branch of workers in its delivery system referred to as the field cast model.
The field cast model part of Yamato’s superior workforce system consists of main housewives who work part-time for the company. In the delivery business, one of the common problems is the peak-load time congestion. Peak-load is a period in the morning and evening when a lot of parcels need to be delivered quickly. This problem drove the Yamato transport company to hire housewives who do not have full-time jobs to ease off the pressure of the work involved in the peak-load hours.
As Japanese society has been changing since the last half of the previous century and onto the new one, most of the people from the younger generation, both men and women, prefer full-time jobs. As a result, Yamato has been facing the problem of finding part-time workers for the field cast model as well as the adequate human resources to train them. Since 1999, the company has been employing housewives to work at peak-load times, and then they go back home to take care of the family since their husbands have fulltime jobs. Nowadays, the number of families with both parents have a fulltime job has exponentially increased thanks to the evolving society. As a result, the field cast model does not appeal to many women as they want fulltime jobs. This has become a problem to the managers at Yamato as they must hire a workforce that’s both efficient and above all cost-effective
In-Depth Analysis
In Japan, parcel delivery mainly involves the delivery of packages below 25 kilograms across all business models, be it business to customers, customer to customers, and business to customers. From 1871, the courier service business had been dominated by the Japanese government-owned postal service. In 1976 Yamato entered the parcel delivery business and started to flourish. The Postal Services Agency market share continued to decline throughout the 1990s as more and more private companies started delivering parcels, and by 2007, the courier service was fully privatized in Japan.
The growth of these courier companies came about because of the development of the e-commerce sector. Thanks to the growth of e-commerce, shipment orders became heterogeneous and smaller. As a result, the clients expected faster and more customized home deliveries. Speed and precision became a crucial part of any consignment transportation to the customers. For companies like Yamato, prioritization of smaller parcels had to be made over the traditional bulk merchandise which was being delivered to businesses. Yamato achieved this by use of fast, small vehicles that could stop many times and maneuver easily to the client’s residential areas.
As the society of Japan has been changing, and more women are allowed to work fulltime, most couples were not home during the standard assigned time of parcel drop that’s between 8 and 5 pm. Because most couples are working, they wouldn’t be at home during the daytime, and they would request for before or after work deliveries. This led to the peak load problem. The peak load period was a time in the morning and evenings when there was a lot of parcels to be delivered to customers and businesses. These were mainly deliveries that had arrived at delivery centers during the night or parcels that arrived during the day and have to be delivered to the individual clients the same day.
Courier services firms had to establish a new operating strategy to keep up with the workload of the peak load period. Yamato Transport is one of the best delivery companies, came up with the field cast system. This system employed housewives who stay at home for most of the day as part-time employees. The company started with a reevaluation of the deployment of its human resources strategies. While an increase in full-time workers and the delivery vehicles would be a good strategy, it was not very cost-efficient. An increase in full-time employees would mean that operating costs would increase due to salary allocation, and the extra workers would remain idle during the off-peak load period of the day. The increase in extra delivery vehicles would also increase the operational costs in that more would be needed to pay for fuel and maintenance costs.
Yamato’s managers decided to go ahead and implement the field cast system. The company hired homemakers who are free for most of the day as part-time employees to make consignment deliveries during the peak-load periods. The system was first implemented in Osaka in 1999 as a pilot program. The success of this model was always greatly affected by the population density different residential areas as more populated areas had a greater peak-load problem. As a result of the varying success, Yamato strategic management committee was reluctant to launch the countrywide implementation of the model.
After much deliberation by the management, it was decided that the model could be implemented for the whole country in September of 2011. A total of 1004 housewives were hired and they were distributed in 220 delivery centers. The managers tried to hire students, but they proved to be a problem because they were not very easy to deploy. They also were not responsible and mature enough to handle the pressures of the job as it is required that the employees be reliable, charismatic, and have great interaction skills. The field cast model proved to be useful and reliable in its two main objectives of making all deliveries on time and cutting down the operational costs of making the deliveries. This gave Yamato Transport a competitive edge, and it emerged in front of other courier companies.
Business strategy criteria and evaluation of alternatives
For the field, cast system to be operational now, and for the time to come, the managers have to consider some strategies for the model to keep it beneficial for the company. The managers have to take into account things like recruitment, training, and compensation of the employees. The evolution of Japanese society and its workforce should also be considered in the long run of the implementation of the field cast model. How the employees are appraised and compensated is also a criterion of interest when it comes to the implementation of the same.
Yamato should consider recruitment in highly populated areas where the peak-load problem is likely to be common, and there are likely to be people looking for part-time jobs. Acceptable attributes in recruits include charisma, good social skills, and a positive attitude as well as good grooming skills. Once hired, the workers will be needed to undergo training to perform the given tasks. Permanent staff should be considered to make the training process fast and more efficient.
Employee appraisal is critical, as it provides the performance stats of the workers. An appropriate compensation model should be evaluated to give workers some morale as they work for the company. It also helps the employees air out their grievances, and the company can tackle them. For instance, some employees gave some useful information to the managers regarding the comparability of wages and job fulfillment that Yamato field cast model offers compared to other part-time jobs like family restaurants and fast-food joints. They also aired some complaints of how brutal the job can get as they have to walk long distances and deliver the parcels with carts all within a limited time margin during the load-peak period.
The field cast model is overall cost-effective and time-efficient and should be implemented on an even wider scale to maximize margin profit and satisfy the customers; however, some improvements can be made to ensure it is even more successful. The use of bikes can be employed to ease the workers as they make deliveries. Bikes are faster and not very tiring and can get to the most remote areas to make deliveries. In cities, bikes will not create traffic jams, so parcel drops will be faster than the use of vehicles.
Implementation Plan
The field cast system can be effectively be implemented by separating the tasks into long-term, medium-term and short-term tasks. Short term tasks such as recruitment and job assignment tasks should be done over a short period to increase efficiency. After interviews, the people who qualify for the job must be assigned the tasks that they will be performing to avoid confusion and time wastage.
Training is the next step of the implementation plan. This medium-time event is meant to familiarize the new employees with the work that they will be doing and how they are expected to do it. Normally, the training takes place for the first three weeks after hiring. After these weeks, the training goes on, but it is passed on to the delivery drivers to teach the field cast crew on how actually to make parcel drops flawlessly. This can be a burden, especially to these drivers, as they are fewer in number.
In the long run, the management has to consider the long-term running costs, the field cast system consistency as well as worker appraisal and expenditure for compensations. The employee’s wages plan was designed with the housewives’ livelihood in mind. Though the wages are decent, they do not exceed the tax-deductible amount. As appraisals and contract renewals are done every six months, it is easy to decide who to keep as an employee and which employees to let go as time goes by.
Risks
There are some risks with the implementation of the model. The managers are concerned that the truck drivers might not be able to handle the increasing number of new field cast employees in training. If the training is affected, the overall service delivery might decline, which will lead to customer loss. The company should come up with more reliable ways to train and monitor the employees to avoid service decline.
As Japanese society dynamics are evolving, more and more housewives are looking for full-time jobs. The managers are concerned that in the long run, the field cast job opportunity will not be very attractive to recruits, and the company will have to find other alternative employees other than housewives. If this happens, it will reduce the workforce available for the field cast programmed. The hiring team should consider other people to work part-time jobs apart from housewives. Young unemployed people might be suitable for the job as they need money. Self-employee individuals might also take up the job offer, especially in the evenings. The housewives will still be the majority of the employees, but the job will n longer rely solely on housewives to get done.