Table of content
Competitive Strategy, Supply Chain and Work Processes
Quality and Quantity Management Issues
Emirates Forecasting Technique
The process of emirates plausible journey is a tome of a firm whose success story is twisted with incredible development of United Arab Emirates (UAE) economy. Emirates is among the largest international airline in respect to kilometers flown per annum. It is the seventh largest airline in the world in terms of sales and services turnover. This makes it the largest airline in middles east in terms of passengers carried, revenue and fleet size.
Emirates was established in 1985 by Dubai’s royal family and Pakistan international airline. This was immediately after Gulf-air begun to terminate services to United Arab Emirates. The airline was first headed by Amhed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, who is the current airline chairman. Dubai royal family offered US$ 1 million and other initial assets as startup capital, Pakistan international airline played a vital role in the formation tier by providing administrative and technical assistance to the newly formed joint venture (Hayes, 2006 Pp-223).
Emirates airline is among the world’s rapid growing airline with an annual approximated income of above US$ 600 million. The airline carries 80-90 million passengers and an average of 974 million tons of cargo yearly. Emirates aspires at being the national and international leader initializing new carefully selected investments, through authentic business notion, technology and high quality product and services.
Emirates base every kind of operation they undertake on an ardent set of values. The values assures a long lasting quality relationship between the company and the surrounding environment i.e. its investors and customers.
Competitive Strategy, Supply Chain and Work Processes
Emirates airline has a long-range plan of action that maintains a competitive position in the market. This plan includes: emirates long term goals, an understanding of the market place and a way to differentiate itself from other competitors. All other short term decisions made by the company must be in support of this long range plan. The role of operational strategy is to stipulate a plan for transformation functions, so that the company can utilize its resources effectively. Operation strategy specifies the policies and plan for using the organization resources to support its long run competitive strategy (Gagnon, 2009, Pp-137).
Operations functions are necessary in the management the resources’ needed to produce a company product and services. Operation functions supports business strategy, that enables competitive advantage in a location, worker skills and talents required, use of technology, advertising, special processes and equipment needed and quality control methods. It is the role of operation strategy to provide an overall plan to enhance a competitive position in Emirates airline.
Implementation effectiveness can be ascertained by determining how the business meets its corporate goals. Emirates airline uses quite a number of implantation strategy to achieve its corporate goals. Emirates employ expensive resources in form of capital as a tool of investment. Advertising strategy also matters a lot when it comes to product promotion and service delivery. Advertising aids in the creation of awareness that the service exists. Free flow of information within the organization, yardstick progress measurement, application of expertise knowledge and perquisites benefits given to managers working toward the objectives and corporate goals of Emirates airline.
Supply chain management (SCM), is a momentous management tool. Supply partners are usually far-apart and autonomous. The main agenda in supply chain management is to come up with mechanisms that can prioritize the goals and coordinate their activities so as to optimize the system performance. Emirates procurement section helps airline operations by outsourcing and contracting all aircraft commodities such as power plants, fleets, equipment, spare parts, vehicles and airplanes (Hayes, 2006 Pp-233).
This section manages supply relationship to ensure ultimate utility in delivery and performance of any goods and services that Emirates group acquires. Emirate supply partners are: Airbus, Aircraft parts, Aircraft Technologies, Air Products, Aircraft Design and Boeing.
Boeing and Airbus are aircraft manufacturers who sell aircrafts to Emirate airline. Aircraft parts and Air products are suppliers of spare parts and raw materials to Emirates. Aircraft design and Aircraft technology works hand in hand with Emirates airline to design big, comfortable, efficient and affordable airplanes that can carry a lot of passengers (Gagnon, 2009, Pp-138).
The way an organization creates value and the role of processes in the creation of value, are recurrent concerns in many organization. There is a tight link between process and the creation of value that makes process too vital to any organization. A chain of values describes in detail all the process a firm undertakes to create goods and services. Emirates work process also entails a sequence of activities that adds up value to a product or service in the preceding stage.
Work process enables allocation of resources to vital products such as spare parts and advertising. Work process brings out a clear understanding of what is to be done at each process. This ensures efficiency in the airlines’ working process. The main disadvantage associated with working process is loss of regular monitoring, the service being delivered passes through several departments under different management teams.
The airline has to synchronize dealings on daily basis caused by unforeseeable circumstances, such as extreme weather conditions and medical emergencies. Emirates airline also depicts integrity in times of delay, diversion, cancellation and re-routing. It has a better speed and quality of recovery decisions that are just in time. The diagram below shows the emirates process of discovering and delivering a service.
Emirates airline steadily monitors the global aviation industry for product and service innovation. This is in response to cultural, technological and economic dynamics that affects airline customer needs and expectations. Emirates airline are bolder in design. They have also embraced the latest technology as an innovation to differentiate passenger experience. Emirate unique feature of company’s’ product and service design include: comfy “family couch” seats, business class that ticks, passenger experience, 3-room residence suites, fixed hand-rest support, Wi-Fi and other entertainment services. The airline also offers early and late booking flight services.
Emirates airline has a marketing plan that involves issuing out of free flight travel tickets during holidays, vigorous advertising, reinventing the market strategies and observing competitors analysis strategy to counter the existing competition. Emirates airline faces several challenges while administering its marketing strategy. Competition, inadequate information about their clients and delays in decision making process are among the major draw backs it experiences while marketing its products (Gagnon, 2009, Pp-135).
Quality and Quantity Management Issues
Emirates airline was observed to contain four phases of quality and quantity management control. These phases are total quality management, quality assurance, quality control and quality inspection. Quality inspection phase employs a team of inspectors to inspect the quality of product and services offered by emirates airline. The idea behind quality inspection is to detect items with poor quality that can either be scrapped or shipped back to the suppliers.
Emirates airline has also adopted statistical quality control measures. This tool identifies problems that occur earlier and to have full control of all its departments. Quality assurance stage mainly focuses on pre-production activities and it relies on the quality of standards or instructions to assist in the reduction of risk failures and mistakes in Emirates airline service delivery. Total quality managements in emirates airline simply involves understanding and implementing quality management principles and concepts in every aspects of the organization including, its customers and its suppliers (Bergman, 2007 Pp-304).
Emirates airline was observed to contain some elements of poor quality. This elements included: flight delay and cancellation, poor customers services, irresponsible workforce, angry and frustrated employees and personal problems were reflected at work. All these unfavorable elements result to lowering emirates airline quality of standards (Bergman, 2007 Pp-222).
Capacity planning in emirates airline has had special weight due to financial advantage that it offers under efficiency in capacity planning within their information system, planning system and material requirement. Inadequate capacity can immediately lead to drastic fall in performance and superfluous increment of work-in-process. However, excess capacity in the other hand can be needless and costly to emirates airline. Capacity is a significant factor in the emirates choice of technology.
There are notable factors in emirates airline that affected capacity planning. This factors were as follows: ability of workers, number of workers, defective service, suppliers, government regulations, errors, productivity, number of machines and preventive maintenance. Capacity planning is pertinent to emirates short and long term goals. Proper management of all factors affecting capacity planning leads to a soaring level of utilization and efficiency rate.
Organizational efficiency is the ability to implements all its plans using the least amount of expenses. Planning is an important factor in emirates organizational effectiveness. Effectiveness is simply the ease of degree of success with which an organization is capable of accomplishing its goals and objectives. Emirates planning strategy can result to can lead to a conclusion that it registers a high level of efficiency in delivery of services (Hayes, 2006 Pp-229).
Emirates Forecasting Technique
Forecasting techniques provides carping information to airport management and planning departments. Cargo and passenger forecasting is not only a non-empirical practice. Emirates airline considers underlying market forces based on market assessment and economic theory as well as constraints and physical capabilities. Forecasting translation requires a careful practice from planning metrics to review of current and past activities. Forecasting is an intrinsic unsteady activity since past experiences can only be a hint about future performance.
In order for forecasting to yield successful result it should contain the following principles: consistent assumption should be applied, use of a more reliable an current data, use of the most appropriate forecasting methodology and technique and all the uncertainties surrounding the forecast should be identified and dealt with (Porter, 2006 Pp-73).
The most important aspect of forecasting in emirates airline is the ability to foresee market demand whether in volume, fleet usage or infrastructural usage. A good forecast of demand allows Emirates airline to invest only in facilities, equipment, staffing and infrastructure as needed. Forecasting on raw materials in an airline is mainly affected by the law of demand and supply of commodities in need.
Common forecasting techniques that Emirates airline the simple growth rate model, time series and econometric techniques. Emirates airline also uses sophisticated forecasting software that leads the market to an advanced automation that includes mode selection. This software application tests the airline data against a library of forecast method and it finally selects the most appropriate and accurate method for any kind of data entered.
Location, Lay-out and facility Planning
Emirates airline has its headquarters’ in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Its current location benefits the airline in various ways. The good infrastructure enables ease of access to both passengers and cargo. Dubai is a world center for trade where buyers and sellers all over the world converge. The buyers and seller use emirates airline as the quickest means of transport for them and their goods. The location of emirates airline has a proximity advantage in terms of access to other businesses and services. The location also allows demographic of business operation because it serves both local and international market. Strategic location of the airline enables an opportunity for it to increase its market share (Porter, 2006 Pp-68).
Dubai international lay-out terminal was conceived on 14th October 2008. It the largest airport terminal with over 1,714,000m2 of space, it was built at a cost of US$4.5 billion and holds a capacity of 43 million passengers. The terminal lay-out contains an underground structures i.e. restaurants, business class lounges, management offices, over 180 check-in counters and over 2600 car packing space. The airline is also equipped with adequate facilities that enables effective management of resources and high utility in service delivery.
Preliminary insights found by this project have indicated that airlines perform ill-defined tasks which they accomplish successfully aided by years of experience. The problems that they solve are diverse in nature. Additionally airlines work on a variety of problems, each with a separate time scales. Some problems will present hours in advance and will be worked on, on and off for hours.
During these situations, multiple solutions will be formulated, information will be gathered, and possible solutions and scenarios will be discussed. Other problems will only be noticed at the last minute and will require very quick decisions to be made with little time for information retrieval. These preliminary findings suggest that any decision tool designed to assist airlines will need to be flexible (Porter, 2006 Pp-61).
Finally, having discussed all the details about the achievements of Emirates Airlines within its entire existence and until today, we can state with certainty that the organization has a high level of risk management. During its growth period, the firm has faced quite a number of challenges. Without forgetting the fact that before its initiation it did not have any plane, but at the moment they are considered one of the biggest owners of the Boeing aircrafts and Airbus.
A big plaudit can be given to Emirates airline for not only having a full aircraft ready, but also having entertainment that is regarded of high class rating. The firm also owns IFE integrated planes, this is quite a big investment which is also very profitable. Passengers paid more interest and attention to the appealing of the incentives offered that came with the option of choosing Emirates Airlines.
References
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Appendixes
The map below shows the location of Dubai international airport and headquarters’ for emirates airline.
Airline – It’s any organization in provision of regular services of air transportation in more than one route.
Airbus – this is an aircraft that is designed to economically transport a large number passengers over short air route
AFCS – Automatic flight control system. It is an advanced air pilot.
AFDS – Autopilot and flight director system
Boeing – it’s a US company that manufactures passenger aircraft
Emirates flight is said to have 164 destination points in 78 countries, across all the continents.