Operation Management

Executive Summary

In the world of business there are many essential parts to a successful operation. Some may say that marketing, production and/or sales are the most important part of any business, but after studying the process of operation management, it is found to be the backbone of any business process. Operation management embodies all aspects of the business process and unites them to create an efficient resourceful procedure. In this paper we analysed the operation management of Easyjet airline and Toyota.

Operation Management

Introduction

According to Slack and Lewis, operations strategy is the total pattern of decisions which shape the long-term capabilities of any type of operations and their contribution to the overall strategy, through the reconciliation of market requirements with operations resources. As a part of doing business, all the organizations have to compete with companies which produce similar goods and which might supply similar goods in the future. Therefore, to be successful in this great competition, organizations must have a competitive strategy. In this paper we analysed the Operation Management strategies applied by airline and automotive industry. For this we select Easyjet airline and Toyota for our report.

Easyjet Air Lines Operation

Clockwork Operation

Easyjet Air Lines' operation at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta is the largest and most complex transportation hub in the world with over 1000 daily flights and over 30 million passengers per year. It represents over 50% of Easyjet's total operation, and generates over 70% of its revenue. The business situation faced by Easyjet and the transformational strategy developed as Operation Clockwork (Mager, Peter 1984).

The carrier's ability to grow the hub was constrained by both operational and financial issues. The available facility and airspace utilization had peaked, with no room for increased flight activity. Overall reliability was negatively impacted by limitations on airport airspace and runway capacity. Dependence on the Air Traffic Control system to optimally manage the flow of aircraft was increasing. Performance was steadily trending down. Last, but not least, the airline profits were eroding as it struggled to compete with fast growing low cost competitors (Garvin, D 1995).

Transformation Process Begins

To address these issues, Easyjet implemented the largest network restructuring in the history of aviation It was called Operation Clockwork. Every aircraft, market and employee was touched in some way. A total of fifty-nine percent of the Network was rescheduled, with the execution of the new operating plan done in a single day, an accomplishment never achieved before. The most dramatic change was the implementation of a new network and schedule structure design in the largest airline hub in the world - Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson. This change marked the beginning of a transition to a new business model for the airline. The Objectives were (Drucker, Peter F 1993):

To profitably grow without additional capital expense;

To improve in schedule reliability and quality while reducing the dependence on the uncontrollable variable of ATC to control the delivery of inventory (aircraft) to the production facilities (airports); and,

To achieve a cost structure and competitiveness against younger leaner, low-cost competition and ...