Implementing Six Sigma In Qatar Airways For Improving Flight Operations Quality Essay.

About Qatar Airways

Question:

Discuss about the Performance Management and Quality.

Qatar Airways is one of the largest transportation systems that had been considered as one of the safest airways in the whole world. The airline company has developed and further implemented several safety initiatives and other programs to improve the consumer service such as the internal evaluation programs, safety action programs, advanced qualification programs etc. However, the company can gain additional benefits if they implement the widely used and extremely regarded quality program namely ‘Six Sigma’ (Panagopoulos, Atkin & Sikora, 2016). This study provides an outline of one of the most important flight operation quality program, safety program and improving the consumer service and ‘Six Sigma’.

Qatar Airways links over one hundred and fifty global destinations across Europe, Middle East, North and South America, Central Asia, Far East Asia and Oceania, based on the Hamad international Airport. The group of airways has employed more that forty thousand people, out of around twenty four thousand people work directly under the company. Qatar Airways is the first Gulf carrier who has signed with three airline alliances. Being established in 1993, the company was entirely owned by the Qatari government. Since 2013, the company was controlled by the government which followed the takeover of fifty percent stake from former foreign minister. Qatar has three cabin classes as usual, First Class, Business class and Economy class. The company offers luxurious services in both the first class and the business class, however, in the economy class the airways offers a seat up to thirty four inches with individual seat back TV screens. Qatar has an in - flight entertainment program that is called Oryx One. The company made every effort to ensure the safety and consumer experience in the flight experience.

The company will introduce a quality safety program which will ensure the data monitoring program is more prevalent in the flight in future. The benefit of data monitoring has been evident in most of the industries other than the aviation industry (Al-Aomar, Aljeneibi, & Almazroui, 2016). For instance, the automotive engineers use the telemetry system to monitor several aspects of the performance and design of any car. In the health industry, the hospitals use this data monitoring technology to monitor the health information of the patients in order to make sure that there is not any unwanted issue. The nuclear power plants, subway networks, power grids have already started using the data monitoring process throughout their system. Implementing this procedure in the aviation company, it will be able to examine each of the flights; therefore tracking all the flights would be easier over time. The process will include a statistical approach so that the authority can track the improvement of the individual flights.

Even if there are internal and external sources of significant information with the computational technology, the airline managers will be able to gain additional knowledge about the quality of the source of the information as well. With effective tools such as the Pareto charts, Control Charts, scatter diagrams and other effective diagrams and quality management tools the company will be able to track the performance of the airlines. These kinds of system provide significant information to the authority, especially regarding the performance of individual flights, whether it is being constant, improving or deteriorating.

Consumer services and Safety initiatives of Qatar Airways

The concept of ‘Six Sigma’ was developed in the 1980s that includes the methodology, standard and the associated cultural changes in it. The basic concept of the Six Sigma methodology is entirely the information driven policy that totally focuses on the reduction of variation and the process improvements through the six sigma improvement projects (Shanmuganathan, 2014). With the effective determination of the levels of variation, the process will help to determine the ability of referring the standard distribution system. There will be effective measurement of the correlated probabilities. The framework has six vital objectives that will involve a systematic approach.

This stage will involve a systematic engineering approach which will include the scope and purpose that will be defined together with the historical and background information (Axtman & Wilck, 2015). The goals will be defined; therefore the limitations will be brought to the overall operation. This stage will have a stakeholder analysis which will perform which will include the entire airline scenery including the analysts, managers, maintenance, pilots, cabin crews etc.

The stage will be more prioritized as this will be placed in the improvement effort. The background information and the other information will be relevant in this stage. The authority will be able to identify the source of any issue using all the information for the future analysis (Axtman & Wilck, 2015). The present procedure sigma will be determined in this stage.

On the basis of the last stage, the source of the problem will be determined, therefore the focus of the problem will be shifted towards recognizing the root causes of the problem. The root causes can vary from the poor communication skills between the relevant departments, lack of necessary resources, collection of wrong data and many more such issues (Axtman & Wilck, 2015). The data monitoring process will be an advanced process in the proper identification of the trends and factors.

This stage will introduce and implement the candidate solutions. The reason of implementing this stage is to verify the pre-planned improvement factors that can be solved on spot. Some problems can be solved without any further intervention of the authority, whereas several issues may need profound understanding (Axtman & Wilck, 2015).

This stage will implement the suggested solutions that have been proposed in the previous stages. The primary focus of this stage will be the standardization that will gradually decrease the variation which will enhance the higher sigma process level.

Conclusion

The application of this framework has already been implemented in numerous industries. If this quality program is implemented in the Qatar Airways, it will let the company improve and enhance its performance to a higher level. This method will not only improve the safety issues of the airlines, it will also help to improve the consumer experiences with the company. 

References

Al-Aomar, R., Aljeneibi, S., & Almazroui, S. (2016, May). Reducing Operational Downtime in Service Processes: A Six Sigma Case Study. In Industrial Engineering, Management Science and Application (ICIMSA), 2016 International Conference on (pp. 1-5). IEEE.

Axtman, S. J., & Wilck, J. (2015). A Review of Aviation Manufacturing and Supply Chain Processes. International Journal of Supply Chain Management, 4(4).

Biswas, S., & Chowdhury, B. (2016). Industrial Applications and Practices of Six Sigma–A Literature Review. sigma, 3(3).

Cherrafi, A., Elfezazi, S., Chiarini, A., Mokhlis, A., & Benhida, K. (2016). The integration of lean manufacturing, Six Sigma and sustainability: A literature review and future research directions for developing a specific model. Journal of Cleaner Production, 139, 828-846.

Lazur, B. I., Jagadeesh, L., Karthikeyan, B., & Shanmugaraja, M. (2014). An Approach to Improve Aviation Quality Management Using Total Quality Management Principles. In Innovative Design, Analysis and Development Practices in Aerospace and Automotive Engineering (pp. 69-78). Springer India.

Panagopoulos, I., Atkin, C., & Sikora, I. (2016). Developing a performance indicators lean-sigma framework for measuring aviation system’s safety performance.

Panagopoulos, I., Atkin, C., & Sikora, I. (2016). Lean Six-Sigma in Aviation Safety: An implementation guide for measuring aviation system’s safety performance. Journal of Safety Studies, 2(2), 30.

Shanmuganathan, V. K. (2014). Implementation of lean six sigma Techniques for cost optimization of Aero engine repair and maintenance.