How Centralisation Will Assist Inflight Catering Category in Etihad Airways - Research Paper Example

The paper “How Centralisation Will Assist Inflight Catering Category in Etihad Airways” is a well-turned example of the research paper on management. Today we live in a fast-moving environment whereby companies think of ways to improve the organization's goals by moving at a fast pace in order to achieve a competitive advantage in the market. Cost, efficiency, effectiveness, and many more are key indicators for companies to focus which could be achieved. Change is one of the important factors for reaching their goals and sustain performance.

Ariba is part of SAP and is used in a procurement organization to promote Ariba procurement functionality. It is an automated system that made us move away from the manual and long-winded process. The design covers areas such as spend Visibility, Sourcing, Contract, Procure to Pay, and Supplier Relation Ship Management. Introducing these modules would help P&SM achieve cost reduction by 60%, improve stakeholder engagement, and process improvement.

2. Introduction

2.1. What is inflight catering
P&SM Catering Procurement department was established during 2009 by only facilitating catering tenders making sure that it is within governance, then P&SM became heavily involved since 2014 that included participating in negotiations and site visits.

To further elaborate, P&SM in the inflight catering category only makes sure that all tenders go through a governance process being in line with the P&SM manual. As per the P&SM manual, P&SM handles 50% of the commercials and the other half of the technical side is handled by the user department. Currently, the user department conducts the commercial evaluations of the tender’s, manage the contract and suppliers.

The catering department overall spent for 2015 is approximately AED 850 million as per the annual report extracted from GE which includes outbound/inbound catering services, menu card printing, magazines, beverages, etc.

To be specific, the inbound catering service was only around AED366 which includes all the aspects to cover the entire requirements for inbound catering service. Those requirements are (F&B, Handling Charges, Laundry, TCM, and CCM).

Currently, the only centralized areas under Nicholas Marriott (P&SM HOD) are Hotels & Limousine Services, On-Board Products, Inflight Entertainment, Lounge Catering Services, and Midfield Terminal. The decentralized category is only for Inflight Catering Services which is fully handled by the user department.