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Creating better service choices for our customers
Erdmann Rauer, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, shares his assessment of the market and how LSG Sky Chefs is actively creating better service choices for its customers.
insight: What major challenges do you see in today’s market and what are players such as LSG Sky Chefs doing to address them?
Erdmann Rauer: I think most of us would agree that the airline industry is a great industry to work in, exciting, always on the move; but it is also a tough business environment. All of us who operate in this environment need to constantly find ways to raise the bar in terms of performance and quality but also find ways to lower costs. That may sound like a contradiction but that is where the challenge lies.
Working with as many airlines around the world as we do has given us quite a bit of experience in meeting these challenges, especially since we started working together with them on more aspects of the in-flight service chain, not just on the catering side. That is because we could see that there are several interdependencies between the different parts of the supply chain you are managing and together we can often find ways to deliver savings and other benefits by re-aligning a few pieces of the puzzle, and by integrating parts which may have been looked at separately before.
insight: Does that mean LSG Sky Chefs is abandoning its airline catering roots and what are some of those different parts of the supply chain, the “puzzle pieces” you mentioned?
Erdmann Rauer: LSG Sky Chefs is building on its core strength, culinary excellence and catering and adding solutions in surrounding areas which can help airlines lower complexity, simplify and streamline work processes and improve results. We are moving from being a supplier of commodities to offering full solutions packages that are all individually put together to fit the airline’s particular needs. These solutions include in-flight equipment, product design and sourcing, logistics (including inventory management and warehousing and distribution), supply chain management, onboard retail/buy-on-board, deep-frozen meals, CPUs and meal boxes, value added services, in-flight management support, airline lounge operations, ground handling and others.
insight: What is your experience in these new areas and what makes you unique?Erdmann Rauer: That is simple. We are not offering you solutions that we know nothing about or have not tried and tested. This is important to us to communicate because we are in the fortunate position of having a lot of experience and quite a good track record in the solutions business. Just go to our website (www.lsgskychefs.com) and read several customer testimonials and case studies on these areas.
What makes us unique? We have grown our solutions organically and we are managing them in an integrated fashion instead of running a portfolio of separate companies. We work with partners to complement our business but we are careful to provide one common interface and management platform to our customers so that our solutions are harmonized across the board.