Question

Useing Gulf Airline Company ,,

A- Define critical success factors (CSFs) and key performance indicators (KPI)

B- Explain how mangers use them to mesure the success of MIS project.

(1000 Words)

Answer 1

A. Critical Success Factors: Critical Success Factors are indicators for opportunities, activities or conditions required to achieve an objective within a project or mission. It is required to ensure the success of the organisation. Identifying Critical Success Factors enable you to track and measure your progress towards achieving strategic goals - and, ultimately, to fulfilling your organization's mission. CSFs may vary by organisation. Let us study the CSFs for Gulf Airline Company may have for their success.

People: People has always been very supportive when it comes to airline industry. In order to be a high performance organisation, they may recruit quality staff to works as the Pilot and crew member. The airline company train their staffs with communication skills, Crisis management and some special training to serve the customers in a better way.

Product and Services: Products and services offered by the airlines plays as important success factor for the organisation. These are required for attaining a better competitive advantage over other carriers. Products and services may involve, inflight development, aircraft development and ground product offerings.

Routes: Increased frequencies in the route flight schedule sytem made them to achieve better advantage in the competitive markets.

Revenue and Cost Control: It has taken certain measures to control the operating cost. It has taken few measures to reduce the consumption of fuel, by reducing the carriage weight. It has applied lot of cost reduction strategy, by reducing the incoming cost without compromising the quality.

Key Performance Indicators: Key performance indicators (KPIs) refer to a set of quantifiable measurements used to measure a company’s overall long-term performance. KPIs specifically help determine a company's strategic, financial, and operational achievements, especially compared to those of other businesses within the same sector. Key Performance indicators differ from business drivers and aims (or goals) Key performance indicators (KPIs) measure a company's success versus a set of targets, objectives, or industry peers. In the Airline industry they can have below Key Performance indicators to measure their Performance..

1. Departure Punctuality

2. Regularity

3. Delay Minutes

4. Utilization

5. Arrival Punctuality

6. Operating Margin

7. Reportable Dangerous Occurrence

8. Reportable Occupational Illness / Disease

B. Managers use the CSFs and KPIs to measure the success of MIS Project.

Being managers they need to have updated information regularly to make accurate decisions based on the available data and the knowledge rather than on guesses. MIS provides you the ability to make decisions from an informed stance rather than a haphazard one. MIS answers many questions like - When to hire people? In what process the man power has to be put? Which is the most efficient model to implement? What are the customers’ views towards the product? etc. And it helps to have enough staff in the organization. For example, it will help you in taking decisions on what lines of merchandise need to be added or discontinued, or on what kind of investment you need to make. These are typically made after an analysis provided by computer-based information systems. They can able to perform below. The manager needs to have the knowledge of how to analyze the available data and make appropriate decisions. The manager has to be very particular in collecting the data from the data bank. When the manager collects the appropriate data, he should prepare proper models to apply and different possible ways to analyze the data for making better decisions. Using the CSFs and KPI, the managers can perform below tasks to measure the success of MIS project.

• Data Processing: Gathering, storage, transmission, processing and getting output of the data. Making the data into information is a major task.
• Prediction: Prediction is based on the historical data by applying the prior knowledge methodology, by using modern mathematics, statistics or simulation. Prior knowledge varies on the application and with different departments.
• Planning: Planning reports are produced based on the enterprise restrictions on the companies and helps in planning each functional department to work reasonably.
• Control: MIS helps in monitoring the operations, and inspects the plans. It consists in the differences between operation and plan with respect to data belonging to different functional departments. It controls the timely actions of the plans and analyzes the reasons for the differences between the operations and the plans. Thereby, helps managers to accomplish their decision making task successfully.
• Assistance: It stores related problems and frequently used information to apply them for relative economic benefits. Through this it can derive instant answers to the related problems.
• Database: This is the most important function of MIS. All the information needs a storage space which can be accessed without causing any anomalies in the data. Integrated Database avoids the duplication of data and thereby reduces redundancy and hence consistency will be increased. The major function of MIS lies in the application of the above functions to support the managers and the executives in an organization in decision-making.