Operation Management Report: Analysis of British Airways Operations

This report provides an in-depth analysis of operation management, focusing on the case of British Airways within the aviation industry. It explores the core principles of operation management, including planning, organizing, and supervision, and their application in enhancing profitability and efficiency. The report delves into the importance of customer-focused principles, capacity management, and cost control. It examines how British Airways addresses challenges such as competition, customer satisfaction, and technological advancements. The analysis covers capacity planning, the impact of economic factors on airline operations, and the utilization of various strategies to maintain equilibrium between demand and supply. Furthermore, the report highlights the significance of product life cycle management, marketing, and the role of technology in improving operational effectiveness, ultimately concluding with insights into how British Airways navigates the complexities of the aviation market.

OPERATION
MANAGEMENT

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................9
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................10

INTRODUCTION
The area of management which is concerned with controlling the production process and
redesigning the business operations to have more profitability is called as operation management.
Operations are the basic need for all the organisations to produce an effective output from the
resources present (input). Hence, it is very important to have proper management of them to
attain the target with maximum efficiency and profit. With the help of this appropriate planning,
organising and supervision can be done to ameliorate the processes to have more benefits for the
company. This adjustment should be done in the favour of the company. This kind of
management focus on worth delivery which includes optimum use of input ,equipment,
technologies and human resources to deliver better results for any business. To elaborate the
driving forces behind the decision about planning, designing and organising the processes, an
example of aviation industry that is, British Airways of United Kingdom, is taken into
consideration.
MAIN BODY
In this era, it is very mandatory in every firm to beat the competitors. It has now become
a multi-disciplinary functional area of every company along with other departments of the
company (Jacobs and et.al., 2014). It is adopted to ensure that the resources are used efficiently
used to attract the customers and thus, maximising the profit. For this, the managers should have
a proper understanding of each and every field related to the organisation. It involves both
general management and the equipment management. It is the responsibility of the operations'
manager to have a proper knowledge of strategic policies adopted by the organisation, material
planning, manufacturing and the production system planning along with the the analysis of all
the factors influencing them. Cost control is also one of the principle factor behind operation
management.
To deal with all these, decision making should be done while considering the employees
to enhance their performance. For this, smart managers are required. They must have ability to
understand the processes and coordinating the same. Proper communication should be there
between the managers and the employees which will help in minimising the conflicts. They
should have creative approach to solve the problems. To beat the competitors in the present era,
it is important for the managers to be familiar with the new and advanced technologies to attract

more and more consumers (White, 2016). BritishAirways is known as largest airline in the UK
based on the fleet size (273) and second largest relative to the passengers carried (34.6 million)
by it.
To stand out in the market, proper operation management is necessary for the company.
To deal with all these, it must have customer- focused principles which includes team up with
them, continuous improvement for their ease, unified purpose, equipment maintenance rather
than new purchases, minimisation of human error, cut times(this can be accomplished by making
delivery faster), total quality control, visibility management etc. This way, a company can
establish a good image in the target market. They must have to provide with the customers what
they want. Appropriate discount schemes have to be provided to attract the attention of more and
more customers. Various scratch coupons must also have to be provided to garb the attention of
more individuals. By doing so, the customers tends to buy more and more ticket from the same
company while travelling through the airways.
To have an appropriate operation management in the aviation industry it should have to
indulge in the effective capacity management to earn more and more profit. Capacity
management can be defined as an ability to meet the need of customers with the help of
resources available (Mohammadi and et.al., 2014). These resources may include machinery,
factory, labour, raw material, etc. Generally in any organisation the output required can be
achieved by either working overtime or by redeploying the human resources. For this, the
capacity planning is very much important which includes estimation of demand of the services in
the future, labour and machinery requirements to meet the target. To have an effective capacity
management time and capacity are the two important factors to be taken into account. It is
basically imparted to manage the current capacity to meet the present and future requirements.
To accomplish the same in aviation industry 'British Airways' three types of capacities have to be
considered.
Firstly the managers have to check the potential capacity which is for the long term
purpose. This influence the planning of managers. After analysing the customers prospective
behind the company one can manage the aspects accordingly. One has to figure out the demand
and supply to deal with this. Immediate capacity should also be considered for the short term
purpose. On daily basis it must be done according to the needs of customers. Effective capacity

factor has to be evaluated which is the total available capacity which can be put into use. On an
average the annual growth of air passengers and the freight traffic was increased by 4.0% and
5.0% respectively as estimated during the last one decade. Economy is the major influencing
factor for this (Bahmani-Firouzi and et.al., 2014). The capacity management should be done
while keeping in mind the cost factor for the ease of the customers. To have a proper capacity
management, the managers have to analyse the figures graphically to satisfy more and more
customers. Similar kind of analysis is done by British airways to evaluate some factors. In this
way , it is possible to maintain the equilibrium of the demand and supply to maKe the position of
the company better in the target market. This way a company can plan to beat more and more
customers.
From that they have analysed that the expected delay is quite high and standard deviation
is almost equal to expected figures. Also it can be noted that the delay worsen late in the day
time which indicate an unsustainable level of demand. The reliability of the customers is affected
by this delay factor also. To cope up with the same, British Airways is trying to enlarge its fleet
as and when it finds any appropriate opportunities to serve the customers in the best way.
Started with the fleet of a small figure, it has collaborated with many different
organisations to establish a sound fleet size of 273. This way it is expanding continuously to help
the customers. The table below shows the fleet of British Airways as on 29 September, 2017.
According to the demand and supply, it is maintaining its range (Expósito and et.al., 2016). For
this, the company has to manage proper coordination with the transportation system. Airport
capacity can be measured in the terms of aircraft movement per hour. One has to increase the
capacity per slot to cope up with the demands. Air craft flow movement has to be checked and
should be efficiently recovered if there is any flaw. For this, the company has to invest more, but
it has to manage all the affairs in such a way so as to enable the customers to avail the services at
the affordable prices (Anvari-Moghaddam and et.al., 2015). Only this way a company can
become economically stable.
At this time, the company has to deal with various competitors. For example, EasyJet,
which is having more passenger carrying capacity than this. To beat the competition, the
company has to take help of porters five force analysis to check micro environmental factors
which are influencing the company (Bahmani-Firouzi and et.al., 2014).

For this, the company has to check the threat of new entrant or the substitutes. Bargaining
power of buyers and suppliers has to be kept in the mind. Mangers have to think in such a way so
as to make the organisation cost-effective. Company has to track the services provided by the
other competitors to improve its structure to attract more and more customers.
Effective capacity management has to be done to manage the graph of demand and the
supply. Many competitors are there , one must have to track them ,while establishing nay new
things to attract more and more number of customers.
Prices and service frequency are the main factors which determine airlines demand.
Density economics (unit cost variations due to increased output on route) and the scale
economics (unit cost variations due to proportional change in size of the route network and the
output on each route of the network) are to be checked. This industry is also affected by
consumer switching costs which are due to the programs implemented by the company to
establish the brand loyalty. To deal with this the company has to provide various discount
schemes for the customers. With the help of this it can grab the attention of more and more
customers. Marketing should be done in an appropriate manner to let the customers with the
proper understanding of the services provided by the company. This way, a company can stand
out in the market. Marketing managers have to do the needful to manage the same.
They have to establish proper leadership strategy to manage the team working to have an
efficient output. They have to maintain healthy relationship with the customers as well as
employee to avoid any kind of communication gap. This way only the managers can satisfy the
customers according to their needs. They have to provide affordable services to the customers to
capture the attention of them.
Product life cycle involves all the people, processes and the technologies related to the
organisation. Both the internal and external phases of the life cycle are executed by the people
involved in the production of particular products. In all, life cycle refereed to the all the steps
from to convert a raw material into the valuable goods and its subsequent disposal also. For this
analysis one has to collect all the data's starting from the collection of raw material. The mangers
have to check all the factors to improve the status of the company and to ameliorate the services
provided to the customers. Only by managing all these things, the company can attain its target.

Diminishing duration of the product life cycle is possible today because of the use of advanced
technologies. With the help of all these, the company has set its brand image in the market.
For the aviation industry, flight services are the basic products which it can provides to
any customers. Other activities of it includes: aircraft flying, in-flight service like food etc.
provided to the passengers while they are in the flight , ground services such as baggage
handling, unload passengers ,cleaning, waste disposal, maintenance, marketing, finance, human
resource management, etc.
To deal with this, proper management system is required so as to attract more and more
customers (Mohammadi and et.al., 2014). In this era, it is very easy to manage all these affairs
via the use of new and advance technologies. With the help of e-booking and e-marketing, it is
attracting a wide range of customers across various regions. This is also a time saving technique.
All the employees have to work as a team to perform in an efficient manner.
One has to take care of various environmental factors also like, energy consumption,
emissions, effluents and waste disposals. Managers has to take care of labour practices, human
rights and their other problems to keep them satisfied so that they can serve the customers is the
best way. Also, proper medication facility is provided to the customers while they are on the
flight. To meet the exceptions of the strategy form for a particular production, online methods
are helping a lot. Today, the customers can easily cancel the file in case of emergency. Online
data is available at every point of time, if the managers want to figure out a particular trend of
demand and the supply.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, we can say that operations management is important for the aviation
industry to stand out in the target market today. For this, proper strategic planning has to be
done. One has to analyse the effects of under and over scheduling. Capacity allocation should be
done in the best possible way. Demand forecasting and flight schedule optimisation has to be
done. Economic value of the airport capacity should be understood in a proper way along with
the capacity adjustments in case of need. Tactical adjustments also has to be accomplished
(Jacobs and et.al., 2014). The dynamic exchange of recovery capacity should be enabled across
the airlines. In this way, customers can be attracted towards the company.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals:
Jacobs, F.R. and et.al., 2014. Operations and supply chain management (pp. 533-535). New
York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.
White, P., 2016. Public transport: its planning, management and operation. Taylor & Francis.
Mohammadi, S. and et.al., 2014. Scenario-based stochastic operation management of microgrid
including wind, photovoltaic, micro-turbine, fuel cell and energy storage
devices. International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems.54. pp.525-535.
Bahmani-Firouzi, B. and et.al., 2014. Optimal sizing of battery energy storage for micro-grid
operation management using a new improved bat algorithm. International Journal of
Electrical Power & Energy Systems. 56. pp.42-54.
Expósito, A.G. and et.al., 2016. Electric energy systems: analysis and operation. CRC press.
Anvari-Moghaddam, A. and et.al., 2015. Optimal smart home energy management considering
energy saving and a comfortable lifestyle. IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid. 6(1).
pp.324-332.