Nick's Place

USAirways Group

MKT302.04

Nicholas Barnard

Jeremy Traxler

Executive Summary

To regain our competitive edge, and ensure the successful emergence from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection we feel USAirways Group should invest in a comprehensive process of understanding who we are, what we do well, what we do we poorly, learning where the next profitable routes will be, explore ways to improve the profitability of our existing network, knowing who our customers are today, and who our future customers will be. In addition, we have stronger competitors that must be probed for weaknesses. Furthermore, we should invest significant resources into understanding the innovations of our competitors and how they affect our business, and identify innovations that can be incorporated into USAirways Group's business practices.

We believe for any plan to be effective it must be a company-wide effort involving all employees. To this end, we will leverage existing internal marketing channels to ensure that our employees are knowledgeable of our plans, in an intelligent informed way. In addition, we will encourage employee's feedback and input on our business processes, by setting up several suggestion review boards that meet either online or in person at mutually agreeable times.

At the management level we will distribute detailed strategic competitive intelligence reports, and our office will periodically follow up with all management levels to ensure that the intelligence is useful and is being utilized.

We believe in order for USAirways Group to be competitive in the future we must bring our cost structure in line with those of our competitors. Southwest Airlines, an admired competitor, had a cost structure that is 69% lower per seat mile than USAirways Group (Dow Jones). In addition, JetBlue an upstart competitor is gaining ground with a strategy similar to Southwest's. In addition, we should look towards higher quality service carriers such as Delta for ways to improve our service without destroying our cost structure.

Summary of Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence is a system that helps managers collect, analyze, and distribute accurate, relevant, and timely information regarding the business environment competitors as well as their own company (Miller 13). Few of Competitive Intelligence's goals are:

In order to complete the Competitive Intelligence goals, it must go through a four-phased intelligence cycle. The four-phases include:

Where do we get this information?

A Competitive Intelligence analyzer can use the Internet and its databases in order to answer their questions. Some of the questions to be identified are:

We can also obtain information from other sources. Such as:

(Lamb 245)

Understanding Our Customers

The primary focus of understanding our customers is to determine their traveling behavior. In order to do this, USAirways Group must first develop a team of employees that will bring in customers to the organization to provide feedback and insight on how to improve our customer's experience. There is also another way in satisfying our customers, we can satisfy them by conducting research in the following areas:

Finding out about ourselves

USAirways Group has been experiencing problems even before September 11. We need to find our strengths and exploit them, we also need to find our weaknesses and fix them. Given the late 1980's mergers with PSA and Piedmont Airlines and the integration of these mergers that took place during the 1990's, reassessing where the company stands, as a whole is fundamental to our continued success as a whole company, and not the component pieces that made USAirways fundamental to our success. In addition, USAirways exists within a competitive environment of low-cost discount carriers, and high value luxury carriers, but currently does not fit within either of these categories, and as such must compete with both carriers.

Information Officers

In order to achieve a consistent stream of valuable information flowing towards the Competitive Intelligence department, we propose that people throughout the company be designated as information officers who as a secondary responsibility will provide a steady stream of information to the competitive intelligence department via the company intranet.

It is important to select the proper employees as information officers. Information officers should be people who have the context to realize what information is valuable to the competitive intelligence department as to not flood the company with information that cannot be utilized. Information Officers should have at least some of the following characteristics:

(Freidman p. 97)

Information Dissemination

One of the processes that the competitive intelligence department must accomplish is ensuring that the information that is gathered find it in the hands of the employees that are able to act upon it. Therefore all of the information gathered by the competitive intelligence department should be placed in a centralized computer database that is accessible to all employees. The benefits of this method are:

We also recognize that there will be pieces of information that must be shared with all employees, to achieve this we recommend that a newsletter of irregular frequency be established. The benefits of this are:

Employee Education

We should inform all employees of competitive intelligence's results for multiple reasons. Information gathering is something that all employees do already; all employees in the course of their daily jobs pick up and utilize information. Competitive intelligence is making this information available to the people who can act on it. In addition, knowledgeable employees are better able to obtain goals in line with those of the company.

In order to achieve this, we must implement an employee education and communication program. In doing this, we recognize that there are two employee classes in terms of location, fixed and mobile employees, one system must reach both of these groups in a timely manner. We also realize while disseminating information to employees is important this cannot affect their primary job. In addition, we also recognize that long training documents are less likely to be read as thoroughly and completely as longer ones and less likely to be implemented fully. Ergo, we recommend that all communications to non-management employees from the strategic intelligence department be no more than two single sided pages.

We also realize that this communication format will not suffice for managerial employees, therefore communication to managerial employees may be longer but conciseness is of utmost important to make the information as valuable as possible.

How do we find out more about our Competitors?

We can find out more about competitors by being more streamlined with the economy as in quality control or new ideas. Another possibility is to compare with other companies in their hiring practices, purchase processing, and inventory control. We can also find out more about their competitors strengths and weaknesses. In addition we recommend that executives and decision makers make an effort to fly other carriers to evaluate their services, and methods.

Works Cited

Combs, Richard E. and John D. Moorhead. The Competitive Intelligence Handbook. New Jersey: Scarecrow, 1992.

Dow Jones Business News. “Southwest Sets Standard on Costs for Airlines”. Internet: <http://biz.yahoo.com/djus/021009/0149000055_3.html>. Accessed on Oct, 9 2002. 2002

Friedman, George, et. al. The Intelligence Edge: How to Profit in the Information Age. New York: Crown, 1997.

Lamb, Charles W. Jr., et. al. Essentials of Marketing, 3^rd ed. United States: South-Western, 2003.

Miller, Jerry P. Millennium Intelligence: Understanding and Conducting Competitive Intelligence in the Digital Age. New Jersey: CyberAge, 2000.