Business Performance Check Report: British Airways Plc
Introduction
This report summarized business performance check results for British Airways, the national airline company headquartered in Harmondsworth, United Kingdom. It starts from a high-level overview of the company activity, its recent strategic initiatives and competitive positions on the market. Further, the report maps processes to organizational goals and objectives and specifies key business areas that require improvement. Based on the business performance check, report suggests an action plan for improvement, including SMART objectives specification, systems and methods required reaching these objectives, and quality standards required for effective action plan implementation. Implications of proposed changes are discussed in the last section of report.Company OverviewBritish Airways is one of the leading scheduled premium international airlines, which primarily operated across the territories of Europe and United States. As of December 2014, the company employed nearly 39,000 people and was listed as one out of seven airlines which fly to destination in all six inhabited continents (British Airways Plc Company Profile, 2015; Madar, 2015). In United Kingdom, British Airlines operates in three major locations which are Heathrow, Gatwick and London City airports.
It is reported that British Airlines benefits from its strong brand image which gives it significant competitive advantage and helps to record high sales growth in both domestic and international market. For instance, company’s recorded revenues for the fiscal year ended December 2014 were about $19, 300 millions, which is an increase of 2,6% comparing to the previous fiscal period (British Airways Plc Company Profile, 2015). The global competition, however, still exists for British Airways, with the main industry competitors such as Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Continental Airlines, Inc., and United Airlines, Inc. (Madar, 2015).Company’s general objectives are divided into three categories. Global objective is to satisfy needs of all passengers whether they are travelling for pleasure or for business. Premium category stands for ensuring that passengers receive the highest quality of services. Finally, airline category refers to aviation specifics, like ownership of the best available equipment, products and services. There are also four strategic objectives pursued by British Airlines, which is to be the first airline among customer’s top choices, to continuously improve quality of services, to satisfy customer needs and to keep on expanding globally.Interrelationship between Processes and Functions Customer satisfaction is determined as the primary objective for driving success and revenue growth of British Airways as the airline company (Lange et al., 2015). Neely (2002) mentioned that British Airways was started systematically measuring it since 1983, starting with running about 4000 focus groups which helped to identify the most important factors.
These factors, as specified by Neely (2002), were further converted into a blueprint that outlined the so-called “moments of truth”, which are the stages of customer interaction with company services. They included ticket purchase, check-in procedure, departure, services onboard, landing and baggage reclaim. Using regression analysis, it was empirically confirmed that overall customer satisfaction positively correlates with willingness to recommend the flight service and sales …
