Background

The airline catering industry is characterized by a high degree of service orientation, and at the same time, by a high degree of uncertainty and volatility about customer demand and passenger numbers per flight until short before departure. These aspects require ongoing responsiveness along the supply chain and hinder an efficient service delivery.

An introduction of the Leagility strategy enables for the integration of the Lean and Agile paradigm into an overall supply chain structure incorporating the customer order decoupling point as a differentiator between the two paradigms. By strategically positioning the customer order decoupling point, a company can integrate leanness upstream of the customer order decoupling point and agility downstream, thus benefiting from the balance of service orientation while at the same time accommodate cost-efficiencies.

Research Aim and Objectives

The research aim of this study is to investigate the potentials of the airline catering industry towards a leagile supply chain strategy by the means of customer order decoupling point in order to balance the trade-off between service and cost. To achieve this aim, four research objectives are to be fulfilled: RO1: To identify Leagility enablers from current literature; RO2: To localize the current supply chain position of the information and material decoupling points; RO3: To investigate the feasibility of a Leagility strategy in relation to the customer order decoupling point positions; RO4: To assess the applicability of the Leagility enablers within the context of the airline catering industry.

Method

To fulfil the research aim, an inductive approach is followed with a single embedded case study research strategy. The airline caterer LSG Lufthansa Service Holding AG serves as a case company for this thesis. The data collection process comprises literature studies, observations, internal textual company data as well as qualitative data in the form of expert interviews.

Findings and Conclusion

The findings indicate that the theory of Leagility in connection with the customer order decoupling point by the definition of literature does not find applicability in the airline catering supply chain. However, although the applicability of Leagility in conjunction with the customer order decoupling point is denied, the results confirm the potentials of Leagility by using a developed framework of Leagility enablers that can be applied in airline caterers’ supply chains.