International Entry Strategies Adopted by Kenya Oil Marketing Companies Within the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa

Abstract

The need for improving operational efficiency and effectiveness is core to any organization that wants to grow and stay in business within a competitive market environment. For any firm to succeed, it needs to put a lot of effort in enhancing its capability to react to changes, and adjust its business processes to the new market requirements. The fast pace of market dynamics dictates the need for firms to continually adapt and boost productivity to sustain wealth creation for all its stake holders. In order to achieve this, any given organization has strategies in place of continually improving its operations and offer quality service to customers in order to remain relevant in business. To account for the difficult operating business environment, organizations need to innovate on products and business processes as key determinants of success (Anand, Ward, Tatikonda, & Schilling, 2009). Business Process Improvement initiatives and service quality has become an effective approach to improve and optimize organizations’ processes for firms that strive to remain competitive. These process improvement initiatives have become strategically important for service industry most specifically the airline industry. However, the adoption of Business Process Improvement approaches in the airline industry still appears to be in their initial stage. This research explores the existing phenomena of Business Improvement Process adoption and service quality through studies carried out in the airlines operating in Kenya. These Business Process Improvement approaches include methodologies like Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering, Six Sigma as well as the Lean Production (Thomas, 1994 and Kotter, 2008). There is need to have more interest in the processes that focus on customers in order to realise process excellence and world class services in airlines. This research paper analyses the literature on BPI methodologies and service quality concerns by various scholars. The findings from this will provide insights into the efficiency of the BPI approaches and the quality of service within the airline industry. Later, an analysis of the empirical data will be carried with the focus on the observed evidence in the field in relation to the literature. This is done to provide the appropriate response to the research question on BPI approaches and service quality in airline business.