Strategic Airline Alliances: Advantages for Major Airlines Being Aligned

SSome factors including the deregulation in the U.S and the liberalization in Europe of the airline industry are essential to understanding why the number of partnership agreements between airlines has increased during the last 25 years. These events, coupled with the continuous economic downturn and the 9/11 catastrophe seem to be the perfect framework for the tendency to develop airline strategic alliances. However, it has been observed that this trend was not followed during the period 2005-2008. The purpose of this paper is to analyze if a benefit was experienced by the major airlines who became a member of the current 3 big alliances compared to the major airlines that decided not to become a member or were not admitted into the alliances during 2005-2008. The methodology of this report includes an analysis of several airlines’ performance figures. These performance figures include the revenue passenger kilometers (RPKs), the passenger load factor (PLF) and also the market share (MS). The figures will be compared between the aligned airlines and others which have similar business models. The value of this paper is to reveal whether being aligned provides advantages to major airlines under a bearish airline market in a globalized environment.

The HOSHIN KANRI TREE. Cross-Plant Lean Shopfloor Management

Shopfloor Management (SM) empowerment methodologies have traditionally focused on two aspects: goal achievement following rigid structures, such as SQDCME, or evolutional aspects of empowerment factors away from strategic goal achievement. Furthermore, SM Methodologies have been organized almost solely around the hierarchical structure of the organization, failing systematically to cope with the challenges that Industry 4.0 is facing. The latter include the growing complexity of value-stream networks, sustainable empowerment of the workforce (Learning Factory), an autonomous and intelligent process management (Smart Factory), the need to cope with the increasing complexity of value-stream networks (VSN) and the leadership paradigm shift to strategic alignment. This paper presents a novel Lean SM Method (LSM) called ?HOSHIN KANRI Tree? (HKT), which is based on standardization of the communication patterns among process owners (POs) by PDCA. The standardization of communication patterns by HKT technology should bring enormous benefits in value stream (VS) performance, speed of standardization and learning rates to the Industry 4.0 generation of organizations. These potential advantages of HKT are being tested at present in worldwide research.