Mueller unveils a flat MAS structure

KETUA Pegawai Eksekutif Malaysia Airlines, Christoph Mueller bercakap pada sidang akhbar pengenalan terbaru MAS di Malaysian Airlines Building Southern Support Zone,KLIA di sini, hari ini.

PETALING JAYA: Malaysia Airlines Bhd unveiled a structure that is flat and having several new faces at the apex management team.

Christoph Mueller (pic), the current Malaysia Airlines (MAS) chief executive officer and CEO designate of the new airline has broken the operations of the loss-making airline into eight divisions.

Out of the eight divisions, the top positions in four are still vacant, meaning that the new airline is still undertaking the search to fill up the slots.

The four positions are the head of commercial, chief financial officer, executive counsel and head of strategy and PMO, according to documents sighted by StarBiz.

Of the four positions that have been filled, three are new to the airline. They are chief operations officer Peter Bellew, chief information officer Tan Kok Meng, interim chief human resources officer Claudia Maria Cadena Tarazona.

The head of corporate safety oversight Datuk Capt Badrul Hisham Yusoff is from the old MAS.

This is also the first time the airline will have a chief operations officer in Bellew, formerly of Ryanair.

Apart from the eight divisions the new airline will have four subsidiaries which are FireFly, MasWings, Mas Ground Handling Sdn Bhd and MAB Engineering Sdn Bhd.

Former head of MAS restructuring Mohd Nadzir Mohd Basir is the CEO of the new MAB Ground Handing while Azhari Mohd Dahlan (now head of engineering services) is CEO of MAB Engineering Services Sdn Bhd.

Firefly and MAS Wings remains headed by Ignatius Ong and Capt Ritzerwan Rashid respectively.

Since the ground operations and engineering units have been spun into subsidiaries, they will now be cost and profit centres of their own.

Under the previous structure, the airline used to have 11 key divisions where the heads report direct to the CEO and 210 business units.

Though several foreign talent have been hired to manage the main functions of the airline, the search for more talent is ongoing, despite MAS having terminated over 6,000 employees.

Yesterday, a memo dated June 30 was send out to the staff telling them about the interim organisation chart for the new airline, Malaysia Airlines Bhd, which takes off on Sept 1, taking over the operations of MAS.

At a glance, some staff expressed disappointment as they had expected massive changes at the second and third levels.

“We had expected lots of changes but we are seeing some of old faces returning to manage the new airline at the second levels though there has been some juggling here and there,” said a staff who requested anonymity.

But there is also a view that Mueller may have his reasons for keeping old faces.

“Perhaps Mueller may have his reasons to seek continuity and he may have kept the same team at the second and third levels for some reasons,” said an airline executive.

In trying to create the new organisational chart, Mueller has cut layers and layers of hierarchy, so that decision making and accountability becomes more transparent.

The airline is also on the look out for head of marketing, though Laurent Recoura (formerly from Philippines AirAsia) had been appointed head of sales.

Among the other new appointments are company secretary Datuk Sabrina Albakri, and head of corporate communications Faridah Hashim.

The other changes include Datuk Merina Abu Tahir, the current director of corporate services is going back to her earlier job as chief internal audit, while David Renny formerly from audit is now head of ethics and compliance.

Under the new structure, all flight operations will come under Bellew, and all to do with ticket pricing and selling of air tickets would fall under the purview of the chief commercial head.