What is a Service Level Agreement ? “SLA”
Basically a service-level agreement is an agreement which is created between two (or sometimes more) stake holders or relevant parties to agree a set of obligations or deliverables.
Can SLA’s work in an Aviation Production Planning environment ?
Without doubt, introducing an agreed process which can help to bridge misunderstandings and work towards the delivery of an efficient process can only “add Value to the organizational process.
The relationship, even within an organization may be considered to be akin to that of Customer and Service Provider.
Within the organization the relationship is not legally binding, but rather one of best practice. Sometimes internal penalties may be applied real or notional in order to develop a process which can be measured.
Another term which may be used is that of operational-level agreements “OLAs”, however for our purposes the generic term of SLA is perfectly adequate as it describes adequately what is happening.
The purpose of the agreement is develop a shared understanding of the various expectations regarding the timelines associated with internal activities.
Each element, or deliverable in terms of service or services, obligations and committed responsibilities is identified, with the relevant level of service duly described together with the obligations.
The SLA records a common understanding about services, priorities, responsibilities, guarantees, and warranties. Each area of service scope should have the “level of service” defined.
Internal departments can adopt service-level agreements with their “internal” customers — users in other departments within the same organization.
One benefit of this can be to enable the quality of service to be benchmarked, and shortfalls investigated to identify root cause and to develop mitigations to maintain service level.
A service level agreement helps to identify expectations. responsibilities. and facilitate communication between the responsible parties
The Service Level Agreement becomes a communication tool by supporting structured communication and a shared and agreed detailed understanding of what is expected.
The Service Level Agreement may also reduce conflict by removing ambiguities and of course as an internal document, the SLA may easily be modified.
It should be understood that a SLA is an agreement, means you can not inflict an SLA on the other party it has to be an agreement, which is achievable and developed with the total involvement and trust of all parties.
Sofema Aviation Services offers Advance Production Planning Training please see www.sassofia.com or email office@sassofia.com
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Aviation Production Planning, level of service, OLAs, operational-level agreements, Service Level Agreement, Service Provider, SLA, What is a Service Level Agreement
