Lean or Agile Principles in Ryanair’s Operations

Lean or quick Principles in Ryanairs OperationsThis section of the report analyses to what extent contestation or fast principles in Ryanairs trading operations confirm been use, adhered to and how these principles have contributed to the lodges victorious performance.Lean OperationsAccording to Womack and J is (2003), a accompany serves its customers for a real purpose and fulfils a specific customer need. This is light upond through single sufficees which ar in turn carried out by people the companys employees.The idea of fish operations derives from the notion that all these individual butt againstes within a companys operations need to create value for the customer. If, however, a single process crumbnot be identified to add special value, then, under a hunt operations principle, this process croup be considered as uneconomical and should be cut up out of operations. (Sutherland and Bennett, 2008 Womack and Jones, 2003)Since a lean operations process aims to remove needless and no value-adding activities, it has been argued by Aitken, Christopher and Towill (2002) that the lean operations principle strength be more suit adequate for products and works with rather constant demand and a low degree in variation. Mason-Jones, Naylor and Towill (2000) go even one tint further and argue that the lean principle should primarily be applied for commodity products or usefulnesss.Ryanair and the Lean Operations PrincipleWith the above comments in mind, a clear line to Ryanairs operations can be drawn.The company has shaped the European air- fail market and has bangingly contributed to the fact that air travel has been viewed more as a commodity service in new years. Especially at Ryanair, air travel is viewed as a content of transportation, bringing their customers from point A to point B without any additional service offerings just about purely a commodity service. (Strategic Direction, 2004)With its low-cost modeling and its defini tion of air travel as a commodity service in mind, Ryanair has deliberately been striving to remove all activities from their operations which do not add customer value in the light of this definition such activities have been described as wasteful by Sutherland and Bennett (2008) and have been grouped into seven distinct categories. Based upon these different categories, an analysis of Ryanairs lean operations model followsIn equipment casualty of Ryanairs business model, overproduction can be seen as any additional service offerings other than pure transportation. Ryanair succeeded in making its customers only demand for the pure transportation service from the company. It rigorously cuts out passenger service food, drinks as well as baggage service atomic upshot 18 only available at extra cost time multi-class airplanes and in cargoner entertainment have been eliminated completely. (Strategic Direction 2004 Strategic Direction, 2006)Delay/Waitingis time that is scattered betw een two activities that do add value (Sutherland and Bennett, 2008). In hostelry to remove waste resulting from waiting, Ryanair tries to keep an airplanes time on ground, that is its turnaround time, as short as possible. This is achieved by exclusively serving smaller, secondary airports with cut back traffic. In addition, minimal catering activities need to be performed and baggage manipulation is simplified because on that point is no through checking to other flights. (McCormick, 2010 Strategic Direction, 2006) menu/Conveyanceactivities can be sustained valuable by applying point-to-point operations in contrast to hub and spoke operations applied by many large national carriers. This system reinforces Ryanairs commitment to bring its passengers from A to B and not to intervene in their possible onward journeys. (McCormick, 2010 Strategic Direction, 2004)Motionat Ryanair can be seen as unneeded steps in the middle of an operating process the company removed such a step by s ubstance of disintermediation in its ticket-selling process. At the beginning, flights were sold over the phone whiletoday the company almost exclusively sells its flights through its homepage, hence avoiding the involvement oftravel agencies completely. (McCormick, 2010 Strategic Direction, 2004)Inventories are greatly reduced and more easily controlled by only utilise one aircraft type, the Boeing 737-800. Through such communicate standardisation, spare offsets for maintenance can be acquired in bulk and used throughout the entire fleet (Strategic Direction, 2004). Furthermore, staff utilisation can be change magnitude since all employees are able to operate on the entire fleet, enlarge tractability in operations.(Human Resource Management International Digest, 2007 McCormick, 2010)Ryanair reduces wasted space by using its capacity on each flight efficiently. By selling seat for different prices, varying according to season, time of the day and time of reserve the company strives to minimise the number of lost capacity in terms of empty seats (Human Resource Management International Digest, 2007). Furthermore, at the airport, Ryanairs sign in areas are reduced to a minimum since a large part of check in can be performed over the internet by the customer. scorn their late popularity, self-service check-in machines are not used by Ryanair since they consume additional space and represent one additional unnecessary step in the companys operations. (McCormick, 2010)Finally, the concept of reducingerrors in Ryanairs operations can be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, employee utilisation in the company is rattling high. Employees are responsible for carrying out a variety of different tasks flight attendants not only sell refreshments on board, they are also demand to assist in the cleaning and baggage handling process when necessary. This allows the company for more control over a variety of processes because employee involvement is higher. (McCormic k, 2010) Secondly, processes that are not core to the company are outsourced and performed by specialists like check-in or baggage handling services. Using their expertise reduces the risk of errors and keeps the number of employees within the company low. (McCormick, 2010This analysis shows that Ryanair clearly puts a lean operations strategy at the heart of its processes, resulting in doing more with less (Aitken, Christopher and Towill, 2002, p.61) to achieve its goal for customers.A Limitation to the Lean ApproachAs the antecedent discussion shows, Ryanair has succeeded in converting their service offer to a commodity applying a lean approach and exploiting its benefits. However, it has been argued by Polito and Watson (2006) that a lean approach susceptibility get to its limits as soon as customer demand is increasing since not enough resources are available in order to realise changing demand. In the case of Ryanair a standardised fleet might represent such a limit. If dema nd on a true street increases sharply, Ryanair might find it difficult to react instantly with increased capacity as larger aircrafts are not available, a ingenuous aircraft change for a given flight in order to increase capacity is not possible. Instead, an additional flight on the given route might be considered which involves negotiating extra landing rights (Johnson, Scholes and Whittington, 2005).Agility and Ryanair A inferenceThe previous example shows that Ryanair, with its high degree of leanness in process operations, might find it difficult to react to sudden, unforeseen changes in the milieu instantly such reactions require a company to be agile and have certain resources at hand that can be considered wasteful in a lean approach (Mason-Jones, Naylor and Towill, 2000). Agility is associated with higher flexibility and responsiveness to market changes (Aitken, Christopher and Towill, 2002) but as long as Ryanair is able to defend its concept of selling its service as a commodity, where brief is solely about transportation and highly valued by its customers, there might be no need for the company to incorporate aspects of weightlessness into its lean operations processes.