WMBA 6695 Week 6 Persuasive Proposal for Approval Example

Approve $86,000 by July 15 to Redraw Ridgeline's Thirty-One Routes With the Drivers and Run Them on Route-Planning Software: A Persuasive Proposal That Starts With the Ask and Answers the 2019 Objection Before It Is Raised

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6695: Communication for Leaders and Managers

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Approve $86,000 by July 15 to Redraw Ridgeline's Thirty-One Routes With the Drivers and Run Them on Route-Planning Software: A Persuasive Proposal That Starts With the Ask and Answers the 2019 Objection Before It Is Raised

The Decision Requested

I ask the president to approve $86,000 in first-year spending, at the July 15 budget review, to redraw Ridgeline Uniform Services' thirty-one delivery routes with the drivers who run them and to schedule the redrawn routes on route-planning software from August 4. On approval, the route supervisors and I begin driver ride-alongs the following week, and every route is running on its new sequence by September 12, before the restaurant season and the October hospital contract renewals.

The spending covers a software subscription of $38,000 a year, setup and data cleanup of $22,000 and $26,000 for the drivers' and supervisors' time on the redesign. After the first year, the cost is the $38,000 subscription.

If the request is not approved, route overtime continues near last year's level of 9,860 hours, about $340,000, and the seven longest routes keep running past ten hours a day.

The Problem in Our Own Numbers

Every figure below comes from the weekly route profit and loss report.

Table 1

Route Workload From the Weekly Route Report, Last Twelve Months

Ridgeline Uniform Services and its figures are composite.

The table shows a balance problem more than a volume problem. The company does not have too much work for thirty-one routes; it has work divided unevenly among them. Route 22 runs four hours longer than Route 9 every day, and most overtime comes from the seven longest routes. Those routes grew one customer at a time over a decade, as new accounts were added to whichever driver was nearest when the sale closed. Nobody designed the current routes; they accumulated.

The late-delivery figure matters for revenue as well as cost. Late deliveries appear in the lost-customer list as a reason for leaving in four of the eleven restaurant accounts that left last year.

What We Propose

The proposal has two parts, in this order. First, the routes are redrawn with the drivers. Each route supervisor rides with each of their drivers for one day in August, marking stops that are hard to service, customer time windows and the sequence the driver actually uses. The supervisors and I then rebalance stops among neighboring routes so that no route averages more than nine and a half hours, and each driver keeps all but at most four of today's stops. Drivers review the draft of their own route before it is final, and pay stays whole during the transition.

Second, the redrawn routes are scheduled on route-planning software, which sequences each day's stops and adjusts for added or canceled stops. Route-planning methods have been studied for half a century, and Laporte (2009) traces how the algorithms behind such tools became capable of handling realistic problems. The software is not the new idea here. The new idea is redrawing the routes with the drivers first.

The 2019 Trial, and What Is Different

In 2019 Ridgeline licensed a routing program for three months. The program generated new sequences, the drivers kept their own and the license was dropped after one quarter. That trial cost money and goodwill, and a reasonable reader would expect the same result again.

Two things are different. In 2019, the program was given the old routes and asked to sequence them; the imbalance between routes was never addressed, so drivers on long routes saw no relief. In 2019, the sequences came from the program and were handed to drivers; drivers had good reasons for their own order, such as a hospital loading dock that is only open before seven, which the program did not know. This time the drivers' knowledge goes into the routes before the software is used, and drivers review their own routes before they take effect.

O'Keefe (1999) found that persuasive messages which raise an opposing argument and then refute it outperform messages that ignore it, while messages that raise the argument without refuting it do worse. Allen (1991) reached a similar conclusion. The 2019 trial is therefore named here rather than left for the reader to supply.

What It Costs and What It Should Return

Table 2

First-Year Cost and Expected Return

Fuel savings assume about 1.1 million route miles a year at nine miles per gallon and $3.80 per gallon.

The estimate is a range because the actual saving depends on how much rebalancing the drivers' reviews allow. Even at the low end, the project pays for itself in the first year, and the second year costs only the subscription. The estimate does not count retained restaurant accounts, which would add to the return.

How We Will Know, and When to Stop

The proposal includes a stopping rule. After ninety days, if overtime on the seven longest routes has not fallen by at least 10 percent compared with the same weeks last year, I will recommend ending the subscription at the first renewal date, which the vendor has agreed to set at twelve months with a ninety-day notice. The redrawn routes would stay, because they cost nothing to keep. I will report overtime by route in the weekly route report, so the president sees the result in the same place he sees the problem.

The Drivers' View

I have discussed the plan with the three most senior drivers. Two support it, and one, who runs Route 4, opposes any change to his stops; his route averages 8.6 hours and would change only slightly. The president will likely speak to all three, and their views are stated here so nothing he hears comes as a surprise.

Decision

I request approval of $86,000 at the July 15 budget review, with work starting August 4 and the ninety-day review on November 3.

References

Allen, M. (1991). Meta-analysis comparing the persuasiveness of one-sided and two-sided messages. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 55(4), 390-404. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570319109374395

Laporte, G. (2009). Fifty years of vehicle routing. Transportation Science, 43(4), 408-416. https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.1090.0301

O'Keefe, D. J. (1999). How to handle opposing arguments in persuasive messages: A meta-analytic review of the effects of one-sided and two-sided messages. Annals of the International Communication Association, 22(1), 209-249. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.1999.11678963