What the SLA Text Leaves Open: Service Level Agreements and a Ground Handling Provider's Internal Register

Abstract

Airlines govern outsourced ground handling through service level agreements (SLAs), but little is known about how the standards a provider records internally correspond to the contract documents it holds. This exploratory document analysis compares 17 SLA texts, held by one ground handling provider as working copies, with the provider's internal SLA register, which records a threshold and a compliance target for up to 24 key performance indicators per carrier. Register entries for 14 carriers (309 cells) were classified against the text, and seven measurement and sanction provisions were coded for every text. Of 244 recorded thresholds, 82 had no counterpart in the examined text and 22 were referred to documents that were not examined; where the text set a value for the same element, the register differed in 23 of 134 cases (17.2%), with no consistent direction. A compliance target appeared only in the register in 166 of 289 cases. Entries recorded as not measured concentrated in aggregate rates, which accounted for 33 of 45 such entries. Eight texts assigned the computation of punctuality to no party and ten gave no procedure for disputing a reading. Because the main bodies of the ground handling agreements, later amendments and other referred documents could not be examined, the discrepancies are documentary: the material cannot separate whether they reflect the provider's own standards, unexamined documents, amendments or recording errors. The study proposes that providers record the source and version of every register value and that each contracted indicator state its data source, computing party and dispute route.