Airlines Industry Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Airlines Industry - Assignment ExampleWorking in tandem with the concept of e-business, e-Procurement, a B2B concept, is the online purchase of goods or operate electronically. Cathay Pacifics CxeBuy electronic procurement system came into existence at its headquarters in Hong Kong by the end of 2001, across different departments and spend categories. Central to achieving Cathays e-business quite a little was the impetus to apply Internet-based tools to building the most efficient purchasing process and capability in the industry. CXeBuy was the first Oracle Internet Procurement (OIP) solution ever implemented by Oracle for an airline. In March 2002, the Australia was identified as the first location to be benefited from CXeBuy as it had the potential of linking its six ports under a common purchasing process and supply base. Japan, with its five ports, was slated to be the next target for implementing this process. Initially Cathay Pacific adopted this strategy in lodge to be mo re competitive and to Web-enable the procurement of goods and services for five of the airline spend categories, namely in-flight service, cargo, information technology, marketing and office supplies. The driving force tardily this concept was the perceived potential to network all parties involved with the marketing, distribution, consumption and servicing of a Cathays business in order to provide opportunities to significantly rectify the co-ordination and efficiency of operations (OECD, 2001). The driving forces for adopting an e-procurement system and the salient features of such a system at Cathay areInternet is to be used to transport order information, between Cathay and its suppliersIt was implemented to replace the existing Engineering Maintenance Planning and Control System (EMPACS). EMPACS also the inventory management system, has been virtually for the last 25 years. Management felt the need to streamline the requisitioning processes and purchase order approving pro cesses. Financial Management Information System (FMIS) was used for affect payments and general bookkeeping activities. FMIS carried supplier address and billing information. Both EMPACS and FMIS used to manually key in the address and details whenever new suppliers were added or to miscellanea the details of existing suppliers. This manual operation was prone to errors.Common exchange rates information database was being maintained at SHARE which was used by many departments during their operations. SHARE held many different exchange rate tables like inter-airline billing rates, exchange rates in settling invoices raised by afield suppliers etc. for the same period at any one time. These exchange rates were being manually updated.One separate Airline Purchasing part (APD) comprising 50 staff was functional since 1996 to serve the five major user departments and respective spend categories Marketing, Fuel Services, Information Technology, Ground Services and In-flight Services. The APD staff was to strike an appropriate supplier, enter the information onto EMPACS and generate a purchase order that was printed through the IBM mainframe located 20 kilometers away from Cathays head office. Every a few(prenominal) days a batch of purchase orders would be physically transported from Quarry Bay to Cathay City, where they would then be distributed to various department managers for approval to purchase.The approval process in itself used to take a few days with as many as seven approval, validation and distribution steps. Then