What one coffee shop does better than an airline (it’s not the coffee)

This week, my Southwest Airlines flight from Santa Ana to Sacramento was delayed by an hour. A flight attendant had become ill overnight and could not come to work.

It surprised me that the second-largest domestic carrier is worse at #operations scheduling than my local coffee shop.

Some years back, a good friend, Mr. “Coffee Boss” Furioso, opened The Human Bean franchise in the Treasure Valley. Within a few months, Coffee Boss realized that opening the stores on time is critical, as a large portion of coffee is sold in the early morning.

An airline would also want (I think) to “open the store” on time and ensure that the day's first flight leaves as scheduled. Introducing delays in the system at the start of the day likely has a domino effect on multiple schedules.

We made a simple cloud app to solve this one problem - it kept a list of critical employees that must be at work at a specific time and sent them text messages at a predetermined lead time to confirm that they could make it to work on time. If the employee did not respond, a manager was notified, which gave them enough time to organize a replacement.

We did this ten years ago – it was simple, effective, and cheap to implement.

Why did Southwest, which employs thousands of IT staff and subcontractors, fail with a core #scheduling #workflow ?

An airline scheduling system is as complex as they get – it is not your “simple” Outlook or Google calendar. It must juggle the availability of people, facilities, equipment, and consumables. This is surprisingly similar to what #healthcare services provider scheduling must also be able to do, an at-home test sample collection by a phlebotomist, for example.

So why did the airline fail? And it was an “almost total” failure – we were lined up to board before the gate agent learned that a flight attendant was missing, and it took 30 minutes to figure out why. Had there been a working process and IT systems to support it, that should not be possible to happen.

This was likely an organizational rather than an IT failure. No one seemed to be on the hook to ensure the day's first flight was ready. This type of behavior rarely happens when simple “carrots and sticks” are applied to drive a business KPI that can be measured easily and unambiguously.

My friend, the Coffee Boss, was always in the loop of his stores’ schedules. If no one reacted to an employee not acknowledging their availability to open a store, he got the message and handled it. Personally.

Running an airline with close to 70,000 employees is (obviously) somewhat different than operating a dozen coffee shops, yet there is no substitute for applying basic, common-sense operations management techniques.

I am curious how this was handled. Did it escalate up the chain? Did anyone think it was a problem that needed fixing, or was it buried in the noise of thousands of similar events? Will Southwest spend seven figures on management consultants to produce a 100-slide deck of truisms?

Our flight took off when a flight attendant was called to cut short her vacation. She jumped in and helped. That is the type of employee everyone wishes they have more of and shows tremendous loyalty. On that front, Southwest is a clear winner and a company that employees clearly value working for.

At the same time, relying on personal heroism is how young Silicon Valley startups tend to run, but it is not the way to run a railroad - or an airline, in this case.