Looking closely at procurementMcKinsey has a survey we call Global Purchasing Excellence that we use to work with airlines and score them across a series of different categories. How well does procurement link with strategy? What are the capabilities? How good is category- management execution in the structure and systems? And we can look at the scores in this chart (Exhibit 3). The outer, dark-blue line is the average top-quartile score across all industries, and the light-blue line is where the airlines in our survey are. In all parts of this survey, airlines don’t perform as well as top-performing companies across industries.