Macedonia Airport - Total Quality Management

Introduction

The article that was chosen to summarize is for an optimization of business processes in airport services company in Macedonia. For this quality control optimization, a method called Total Quality Management (TMQ) method was used to improve the de-icing and protection against frosting of aircrafts departing from the airport. This study was chosen for review because this problem occurs not only in Macedonia, but all over the world where the weather can interfere with airport operations causing delays, inconveniencing passengers, and increasing costs of airports that are then passed on to the consumers. TMQ philosophy was appealing with the few simple points that emphasized working smarter and not harder and it could be implemented in all other aspects of operations. This philosophy takes in to account customer needs first while also attempting to maximize profits.  

Key Points

Macedonia airport services utilized TMQ to make improvements in their deicing process. The airport was dealing with a lot of delays of flights during their winter season and these delays were causing increased expanses, unhappy passengers, scheduling problems, and even fines and penalties. Improvements were needed, so the company initiated the process of research and analysis as to what were the root problems for the deicing procedure. “The survey was conducted by identifying the existing business processes in the company, diagnostic and analysis of all anomalies in the operation, appeals and complaints from the customers, and determination in the core of the realization of the activities.” (Mitreva, Angelovski, Filiposki, Taskov, & Gjorshevski, 2016).

The following steps were implemented during the TMQ.

• Initiative for doing the project.
• Identifying problems.
• Collecting the data for analysis.
• Analysis of the cause of problems.
• Selecting solution and establishing improvement plan.
• Implementing solution.
• Evaluating solutions effect.
• Standardizing permeant solution.
• Closing the project.

 During the analysis of the cause of the problem, there were five major issues that were causing flight delays due to deicing inefficiencies. The causes of delays were prioritized based on the frequency of the occurrence. These causes were:

• Distance of deicing trucks from the base.

It took almost 10 minutes for the deicing trucks to reach the airplane from the time of initiation.

• The process of hearting mixture for deicing plans took too long.

Heating the water for deicing takes more than 30 minutes daily.

• Outdated equipment.

The equipment for deicing the planes was old. During high traffic or bad weather conditions, the shortages of hot fluids due to the outdated equipment caused delays up to three hours.