The fundamental reasons for Gate Gourmet’s success in today’s market is that they provide one-stop shopping for the airlines. The case study describes every details of the services that Gate Gourmet provides, which includes everything from meal preparation to headphone service. Because Gate Gourmet is able to offer this comprehensive package of guest services to the passengers of the airlines with minimal effort on the part of airline employees, this company makes it easy to be accepted into the airline industry.

The importance of information technology to assist Gate Gourmet in scheduling of food and ancillary goods cannot be underscored enough. Because of the 115 flight kitchens in 30 different countries, instantaneous information on every aspect of the business needs to be available in order to coordinate what products and services need to be distributed to which location. Additionally, as Director of Business Applications at Gate Gourmet Eric van den Berg explained, because there are so many possible last-minute changes, additions, and requests, the ability to alter orders, services, leading instructions, and products needs to be hand-on and immediate. The only effective way to complete this type of communication is via information technology, and specifically, Scala is utilized by Gate Gourmet for tracking, communicating, and nearly all other business practices for the company.

There are several issues and problems which might impact Gate Gourmet’s supply chain. They include increasing prices of the food and supplies used for fixed meal plans, weather delays in both receiving inventory and preparing meals for the next 12-24 hour period, cost-cutting measures by individual airlines which limit cost per meal or eliminate meals altogether, or even random terroristic actions which can impact air travel in a country or globally, similar to the 9-11 fallout in the United States in the early 2000’s.

The importance of supply chain integration in the context of Gate Gourmet’s supply chain is managed by e-gatematrix and assists the company with managing changes in flight services, meal services, in-flight equipment, and supply chain issues. Because the e-gatematrix is an integrated system, it quickly and accurately communicates both upstream and downstream to ensure the most cost-efficient, time-efficient strategies for both Gate Gourmet and the airlines they are partnering with.

Supplier and business partner collaboration would help Gate Gourmet because where Gate Gourmet is a one-stop-shop for customer food and in-flight services for the airlines, it needs one-stop type of shops to provide its supplies and inventory as well as its technology. Because Gate Gourmet states that “we hold our suppliers and business partners to the same high standards under which we operate,” (Supplier-related, 2015, n.p.), the company needs effective collaboration from and cooperation with its suppliers and business partners.

Probably the most important option or alternative that should be recommended to Gate Gourmet to enhance its business given that its supply chain is global in nature is to implement a substantial amount of resiliency into the supply chain. Because supply chains are, to some extent, “fragmented and brittle” (Lewis, Martha, Shorten, Syed, 2008, p. 1) as well as threatened with loss of data integrity on the information technology forefront, supply chain resilience is needed to withstand unintended or unexpected disruptions to the receipt of materials needed to ensure that Gate Gourmet is functioning optimally both financially and operationally. Lewis et al. suggest that “creating supply chin resiliency requires more than utilizing the framework to identify, assess, and mitigate enterprise risk (2008, p. 9). Gate Gourmet would also need to create an internal corporate culture that “stretches” across all departments and locations of the business, even across the global boundaries of the multiple airport-site locations.