My six sigma project on air travel cost

Hi Shivakumar,
I was wondering if you could consider average cost/trip. Maybe you could look at historical data (for the past 6 months) find out the total cost incurred on travel divide that by the number of trips and arrive at cost/trip.
You could reduce costs by anticipating the number of tickets you need to purchase over the next month and then approaching a particular airline and ask them for a bulk discount. This will not only reduce travel per trip but might also give you extra miles on a particular trip.
I feel cost/trip is the right way to go.

Check, if ticket cost has relationship with lead time of booking tickets. If “yes” frame your problem statement around it.

I’m guessing that your customer has asked for a reduction in Costs from air flight. In which case you can’t change really change it. If you want to make sure that your project is seen as a success even if the costs go up I would get the standard cost for a number of different flights and then continue to gather this on a monthly basis through your project. Having this information will give you an inflation indicator so even if the costs goes up as long as it doesn’t go up by more than your inflation percentage you can claim a win.
You could also take another indicator outside of cost e.g. miles travelled by air. This would then backup the work you’ve done if costs don’t go down.

I think these two represent the best options.  If domestic air fares in India are anything like they are in the US, they are very much subject to a number of things outside your control.  You definitely want to have a metric that you can affect rather than cost.  Cost brings into play all these things which you can’t control.  You can control things like number of trips, miles traveled by air.  As fares continue to rise because of fuel, you want to be sure your metric shows improvement, which a cost metric will probably not do. 
I think the cost index idea suggested by a couple people would not really help because airfares can be very dependent on a lot of micro factors and can’t all be adjusted by a single factor.  Again, you want to make sure that what you are measuring is something you can directly affect. 
Best,
GP
 
 

You may look at number of trips year over year (increasing in proportion to the business, unecessary trips ect.) 
Lead time for booking trips is a good one (compare quantity of lead time vrs no lead time) 
Cancelled trips, what happens to these tickets, are there fees etc.