Logistics
Essays

Virgin America has quickly established itself as one of the premier airlines operating throughout North America, generating $760M in Operating Revenues as of the close of its latest fiscal period reporting a Net Loss of $19M and operating margin of -1.6%. As Virgin competes in a very price-driven and capital-intensive industry, their latest financial results the exceptionally high pressure on new entrants into commercial aviation. Their latest financial results are shown in Appendix A: Virgin America Consolidated Statement of Operations and Appendix B: Comparative Operating Statistics, both obtained from the company's website. Analyzing their financial condition indicates just how challenging the launch and successful operation of an airline is. Their fuel costs increased 66.9% for the nine months between September 30, 2010 to September 30, 20112, and Aircraft Maintenance increased 51.5% in the same period. Both of these figures are shown in Appendix A. To reduce the costs of operations many commercial aircraft service providers also rent jets to mitigate the costs of purchasing them. The use of value-based and time-based pricing optimization pioneered by Virgin in the Australian and Asian markets has given the company an advantage in managing its cost of capital requirements as well (De Roos, Mills, Whelan, 2010). Virgin is expanding aggressively into new markets and this is costing the company a significant amount of their cash as well. In the nine months from September 10, 2010 to September 30, 2011, Virgin spent 26.4% more on landing fees and other rents. The total invested in the first nine months of 20-11 was $63M, a significant amount by any standard of commercial aviation (Hazledine, 2011). This also created the need for a high spending level in Guest Services, which jumped by 30% in the same time period, reaching $31M. Virgin continued to invest in these areas with the goal of ramping up their freight and third party logistics businesses, which are significantly smaller in their revenue contributions that the main Guest revenues. For the latest nine month fiscal period, Virgin generated $62.14M in revenues, a 26.4% increase in these non-passenger revenue business models. The high prices Virgin is paying for aircraft rents, maintenance, increased landing fees and operating expenses were important to establishing their freight businesses. Virgin however is finding the growth of their 3rd party logistics and non-passenger revenue slow in the business-to-business (B2B) markets globally.

Supply Chain Management in the 21st Century

It is a new era of transparency and compliance in accounting practices within public and private companies, and this is completely changing the role of annual reports and strategic plans.

Building Streamlined Supplier Relationships Within the Organisation Using SAP

This paper examines the differences between logistic tics in the military and business contexts. It emphasizes the differences in logistics in terms of management, operations, design and administration. Central to this paper is the view that the aims of military logistics and business logistics are essentially different. However, it is also argued that there are many areas of similarity in terms of methods, processes and administration that need to be taken into account.

The history of international courier service DHL is important, but only brief history is necessary here. DHL began in San Francisco, but it spread rapidly and now covers 220 countries (History, 2004).

Concepts of SCM and the evolution to its present day form

In an effort to meet customer, stakeholder and shareholder expectations, many organizations have had to adopt unique supply chain management methodologies as well as to incorporate them into their corporate objectives…

From the data given, it seems as though the number of supply chain management services provided to a logistics company's customers is definitely correlated to the IS capability rating of that logistics company.

Many of the communications tools listed are well applicable in these circumstances and we need to start with the actual characteristics of the business to determine which are the most effective.