Best Practices - Airlines Best Practices: Airlines

Best Practices - Airlines

Best Practices:

Airlines

When choosing an airline, it is important to know what you are paying for. For this reason, it is a smart idea to browse through an airline's "best practices" section in order to see just how well that company treats its patrons. Out of the five airlines examined for this exercise, for instance, all five had "best practices" listed clearly for the public, yet only American Airlines took the time to provide an easily-accessible, clear document that provided all details necessary to the public. This paper will summarize this document, and provide a context in which it ought to be analyzed, below.

Best practices are defined as methods, or techniques, that have shown results "superior to those achieved with other means," and which are, therefore, utilized as benchmarks.[footnoteRef:1] American Airlines provides its customers with a full page of details as to its best practices. This is easily accessible in a PDF document on the company's website. The document starts with an explanation of the challenges faced by the company, which is quite specific. However, this is not bad, as the best practices section should focus on something specific, as well as its solutions, both of which this document provides. [1: "Best Practices." (2011). The Business Dictionary. Retrieved December 3, 2011, from . ]

In essence, this describes some challenges for the company. For instance, it describes the fact that American Airlines has over 650 planes and over 74,000 employees, and with this fast growth it holds many challenges such as:

1. Reductions to meet financial needs,

2. Workforce reductions in order to meet these needs, which can involve multiple and work groups,

3. Existing processes, furthermore, according to the Airline, were "slow, manual, error prone and inadequate,"

4. And lastly, the airline quoted as a challenge compliance with various regulations.[footnoteRef:2] [2: All references from: "Best Practices." (2011). American Airlines. Retrieved December 3, 2011, from . ]

American Airlines also describes its solutions to these four problems, in the same document, and focuses upon consistency, transparency, access to information, rapid rollout and rapid SaaS implementation (i.e. seamless data integration).

Most importantly, this same document talks about results of these various topics and quotes its successes in many areas, referencing these "best practices" as the bases for these successful results. For instance, the airlines, through its practices, achieved "target staff reductions quickly, efficiently and with full compliance."[footnoteRef:3] For this reason, the company quotes that it did five different things as part of its best practices: [3: All references from: "Best Practices." (2011). American Airlines. Retrieved December 3, 2011, from . ]