Quantas

Source of above Qantas Airways picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Travolta707.JPG

Qantas was founded in the Queensland outback in 1920, originally it was the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited (QANTAS) as the airways built a reputation for excellence in safety, operational reliability, engineering and maintenance and customer service (Qantas Info, n. d.). The Qantas story is inextricably linked with the development of civil aviation in Australia. It begins with fragile biplanes carrying one or two passengers in open cockpits and progresses to advanced Boeing 747s flying some 400 people half way around the world in a day and supported by committed staff and loyal customers, the airline persevered through war and peace to serve the nation and build an enterprise. The Qantas story is about the people who have created its exciting and productive history its staff, its customers and the excellence of its business partners and key suppliers (Qantas Info, n. d.). Today, Qantas is widely regarded as the world's leading long distance airline and one of the strongest brands in Australia. Qantas continues to provide outstanding service to its customers and is at the forefront of the international civil aviation industry. The future holds many challenges for Qantas maintaining safe operations and world class product standards while building a viable and competitive position long term for the airline (Qantas Info, n. d.).

Accordingly, Qantas Airways has signed a three-year, systems integration and managed services contract with services provider ASG. The deal will see ASG provide specific support for Qantas' project, launched in 2002 to streamline HR, payroll and financial systems, create an online e-procurement and inventory management system and develop new customer-loyalty applications. The ASG will provide technical development and environment management services based on the existing Oracle system (Crawford, 2006). Qantas is expected to announce an outsourcing provider for IT development, maintenance and support. The airline is planning to move 400 Australian IT positions offshore and final vendor selection will take place at a Qantas board meeting (Crawford, 2006). Being recognized as one of the leading long-distance carriers, Qantas Airways is the world's second-oldest airline, founded in 1920 in the Queensland outback of Australia. Qantas pioneered services from Australia to North America and Europe. Today, The Qantas Group employs approximately 38,000 people across a network that spans 142 destinations in Australia, the Asia-Pacific, the Americas, Europe and Africa (Crawford, 2006). As Qantas continues to grow both in aircraft and numbers of flights the sophistication of its operations began to outstrip the manual, labor-intensive processes it used to schedule and plan its flight crew resources. Like most airlines, Qantas uses a complex system of seniority and merit to enable flight crews to bid for routes and promotions, planning its resource requirements two to three years in advance (Crawford, 2006).

Moreover, the airline used a basic combination of fragile spreadsheets and manual processes that relied on the intuition of Qantas's experienced planning team. With the company's continued growth, Qantas's crew-resources team would create three-year rolling plans to determine their staffing, equipment, and training needs plans that took approximately one month to complete. New enterprise bargaining agreements then created new demands, mandating increases in productivity, better-timed training, and greater transparency for the planning process itself (Crawford, 2006). Seeking a new platform for managing crew resource planning, Qantas turned to the Kronos Altitude suite of customized crew planning, management, and optimization solutions designed exclusively for the airline industry. In particular, Altitude Manpower Planning (MPP) helps strategically plan for optimized, qualified, and properly trained manpower levels and a cost-effective and efficient operation of the projected fleet. Altitude MPP helps airlines manage short-term and long-term planning requirements for every applicable category of crewmember and supports enhanced decision-making. Crew planning staff can evaluate the manpower impact of changes made to the fleet, from vacations to contract negotiations to opening or closing bases. By more accurately forecasting future events and how they affect manpower, Altitude MPP provides an optimized window to the future, enabling the airline to determine exact staffing levels and deployment costs, more accurately forecast and eliminate manpower shortages, and understand training requirements and training capacity (Qantas Info, n. d.).

Thus, every year Qantas identifies and publishes category vacancies that crew members can bid for using Altitude MPP's crew interface. These vacancies and any consequential vacancies are awarded or assigned to qualified pilots based on seniority and merit. There are usually several iterative cycles of bidding to determine which employees will work on which aircraft at which locations (Qantas Info, n. d.). In the award of training vacancies, Altitude MPP includes a series of optimizing functions to allocate around different constraints such as merit restrictions, date limitations, pilot constraints, training requirements and others. The airline can award, assign, or cancel annual leave; increase or decrease workload to available category establishment; readjust training course commencement dates and more. In 2004, AustraliaÐŽ¦s main domestic and international carrier Qantas launched employment relations practices reflect the low cost business model and draw on practices pioneered by low-cost carriers such as Ryanair, including considerable functional flexibility, an emphasis on maintaining low labor costs and continuous improvement of processes to generate cost savings (Qantas Info, n. d.). The airline start-up was aided by the transfer of staff and their collective agreements from the takeover of another airline. The domestic employees remain covered by a mix of union and non-union negotiated collective agreements.

Aside, it was believed that managing a company, not a share price, means balancing the requirements of shareowners, customers, employees, and communities. And managing a company for the long-term, not just the short-term, requires building sustainable value for shareowners and customers and employees and communities. And these relationships of sustainable value require real trust and real candor (Fiorina, 2003). Thus, to meet contemporary and future