Task: Function Hierarchy

CASE:Sintok Travel Agency

Sintok Travel Agency (STA) is in the business of providing travel consultation and reservation services to its customers. STA generates revenues through bus bookings, shuttle services, train, airline flights and hotel reservations to cities all over Malaysia. STA plans customer itineraries as well as booking tour packages for its customers. In addition to purchasing and selling pre-packaged tours offered by other agencies, STA puts together their own tour packages. STA will often book buses during festive seasons, book airline flight and train seats in advance of the peak season and purchase blocks of hotel rooms so that they can take advantage of the discount fares available.

Sintok Travel would like to eventually franchise and expand their market worldwide. This would make STA a market leader in the travel business. STA would like to do this by increasing their market share of packaged tours, identifying new travel services that provide additional customer incentives to use Sintok Travel, and enhancing the corporate image. They would also like to increase their responsiveness to customer requests without sacrificing quality or increasing costs. One of the goals is to improve the quality of goods and services offered. STA realizes that in order to increase their productivity, they will have to provide better training programs for their employees and reduce employee absenteeism. They would like to maintain a high level of efficiency for their office staff. Right now, each travel consultant has a laptop/smartphone and maintains his/her own records about the trips he/she schedules. STA subscribes to one of the airline reservation systems available and also to a hotel booking service. STA is investigating new technologies and different ways to improve their information services. STA also has a major project underway to find new sources of funding available for expansion. They are trying to improve their cash flow management and reduce their receivables to 30 days at the same time target payables down to 7days as they streamline their operations. In summary among the problems faced by STA are in the areas of human resource, finance and services.

Sintok Travel Agency is located in the new township of Sintok, Kachi Heights, beside UUMs Bukit Kachi and just 2 km from UUMs main campus. Its main customers are UUMs 30,000 plus students and 2,000 plus employees as well as industries and government offices situated in the Kota Perdana golden triangle that spans across Bukit Kayu Hitam to Changlun and Sintok. It has offices in Bukit Kayu Hitam and rent a space in UUMs City Campus, Kg. Baru, KL.

Identify the high level functions for STA.