Optimizing British Airways Operations
Introduction and Background Information
The Company of choice for the proposal is British Airways. It is the largest in the United Kingdom, operating in a range of international scheduled airways route networks. It operates across 300 destinations around the world transporting about 36 million passengers annually in 97 countries (British Airways, 2000). As a result, it is the leading company not only in the United Kingdom but also among the leading foreign enterprises in the airline industry. It deals with both domestic and international carriage of mail, freight as well as ancillary services. Since it privatization in 1987, the Airline has significantly developed despite cutthroat competition in the industry. This Airline focuses on delivering quality flight services and creates a favorable environment for both the employees and clients. This culture is evident in the company for a number of years aiming at inoculating its customers against competitors. As a result, the company is the most admired in the United Kingdom.
The choice of this company was driven by the following. First, Airline industry is one of the most competitive industries in the world, hence it is worth carrying out research in a competitive industry as it will give the researcher an opportunity to analyze the industry of interest relative to its competitors. Secondly, the Airways are one of the busiest international airports around the world, hence it can be used as a representative of the airline industry. Challenges faced by this industry will be well understood by analyzing this particular airline. In addition, the airline has global flight network in collaboration with other partners such as Qantas airlines in Australia and American Airlines in the United States. Lastly, British airline is the most critical company in the context analysis of the Airline industry, which will formulate the basis of the proposal. To this end, context analysis is extremely crucial as it enables various stakeholders to understand communication and market drivers that influence customers’ perception towards their brand. According to Fill (2006), there are four stages that should be considered for context analysis namely business, customer, internal and external environments. These stages are particularly crucial especially in the formation of marketing communication plan. British Airlines has been significantly affected by external forces and the industrial environment, hence arises the need to analyze these forces in order to form strategic options of the organization that will in turn spearhead organization change for the benefit of its stakeholders. Research carried out by Finance Yahoo shows that political aspects affect British Airline’s operations. This means that political instability and government influence the terminal points operated by many airline companies. For instance, Arab Spring is said to affect countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Libya changed BA operations, as a result, of flight cancelations in several occasions (Bazargan, 2010).
Workflow Improvement Plan
Workflow improvement program is one of the relevant CLOs to British Airline Company. The airline should reduce digital scanning, printing, and mailing costs by use of a more advanced corporation called Xerox Corporation. This will facilitate the business to manage all its mailrooms and other related operations without incurred much cost. Xerox Corporation will enable Enterprise Print Services, hence simplifying airline mailing operation through delivery of thousands of external and internal emails faster, thus speeding the production of in-flight printed materials (Shaw, 2004). Additionally, the airline should adore the culture of improving customer services through the provision of support and high level of commitment among the workers.
Best practices in customer and employee management
British Airline will achieve the above CLO if it adopts servant leadership model. Servant leadership model is a belief system of leadership that focuses on decentralized organization structure and individual. Also, it encourages the development of leaders and innovation with the aim of serving all the stakeholders. For instance, if British Airways adopts this model then, employees will view providing customer with quality services as their obligation awaiting their reward for the exemplary performance. On the other hand, customers will become loyal to the company due to services such as subsidized flights depending on the frequency of flights they make (Shaw, 2004).
Quality managerial approaches to improve British Airways performance
British Airways should adopt quality management approaches, especially to people related processes in an effort to enhance customer experience. Currently, there is no well-established customer database and a loyalty program hence there is no perfect interaction between the clients and the company. There is a want to generate a positive association between the customers and the company in an effort to promote clients’ loyalty. In this case, intuitions about customers’ decision will be done at all the organization’s level. As a result, customers will be able to book rewards and tickets by transferring their respective loyalty currencies (Fill, 2006). In addition, the company had been using old programs without a customized provision for booking tickets, hence the new database will enhance future customer experience.
Statement of the problem
All large organizations face many challenges while managing their employee and satisfying the needs of all its stakeholders. Big companies are also affected by external forces such as political instability and political imbalances. Since, the objective of British Airways is to provide quality services to its customers, the need to carry out context analysis arises. This study will enable the researcher to identify clients’ perceptions, brand awareness, and attitudes-segmentation criteria. In addition, concerned stakeholders will understand external and internal environments affecting the company.
Research Methodology
The chosen research design will be based on the nature of types of data, the research instrument used, the sample size, and time constraints (Singh, 2007). The sampling design to be used will be multi-stage sampling procedure. The first stage will involve collecting data within the company, and the second phase will collect data from an external environment. Client survey will entail administering questionnaires on the importance of context analysis and how it benefits them. Data collection and analysis will take approximately two weeks.
The data collected will be cleaned of any errors such as incompleteness and inappropriate marking of responses. The data will then be coded for easy analysis. SPSS is statistics data analysis software that will be utilized in the analysis. Secondly, Cronbach’s reliability will be carried out to determine whether the researcher used the collected data to make informed decisions. Correlation analysis will also be employed to determine the relationship between the element of context analysis and other factors affecting the airline operations.
