A NEW study urges travel businesses to adopt and apply the principles of lean thinking across IT and operations in order to create an industry that can better detect, understand and respond to customers’ increasingly complex and changing needs.
Cleared for Take-off, written by innovation forecaster James Woudhuysen and commissioned by Amadeus, argues that only by embracing lean thinking in IT and removing processes that do not create value for the customer can the industry have more control over both, system complexity and costs.In its purest sense, lean thinking is about cutting waste and removing inefficiency to increase effectiveness and customer value. The paper argues that by applying these principles to IT in the travel industry, firms can offer more varied and intelligible functionality to customers in ways that better meet their needs and improve the overall travel experience. At the same time, lean can free up resources that enable businesses to bring innovations into the market more rapidly. Adopting lean thinking also means building drives for effectiveness on objective data, understanding the root conditions of problems, giving decision-making power to the people who actually execute IT processes and proactively interpreting customer data to improve value. Targets and management objectives in lean reflect the customer’s purpose, not the organisation’s prejudices, the study reiterates.James Woudhuysen, the report’s author, commented: “The principles of lean, pioneered by the manufacturing industry in the 1980s, are now being applied to IT and operations within service-based industries. The idea is not only to cut waste and increase efficiency, but also, and even more importantly, to increase effectiveness and create real customer value. “Passengers, travel providers and travel sellers expect travel IT to improve continually. They are accustomed to system stability online but also expect user interfaces to get better at anticipating their demand for particular kinds of travel. They want solutions delivered quickly and expect new applications that are reasonably priced. Lean thinking in IT has the power to organise much of this and transform the industry in the process.”Wolfgang Krips, EVP, global operations, Amadeus, said: “Within global operations at Amadeus, we have recognised that lean thinking involves a shift in management style. It is no longer about directing people, as in a classic command-and-control production model, but rather about nurturing proactivity and reactivity to leverage the organisation’s brainpower. This means that we can achieve scale quickly as we work with our customers and partners to shape the future of travel.”