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Constraint Management at Southwest Airlines
Length:
13:27
Subject:
Bottleneck Management and its Impact on Turnaround Times
Textbook Reference:
Chapter 5: Constraint Management, page 210
Summary
Southwest Airlines (SWA) is one of the most successful airlines in the world. A core competence
of SWA is its employees, who are charged with getting passengers to their destinations on time in
a friendly atmosphere while providing a “low frills” service. A key to its success is ensuring that
employees understand the importance of managing the throughput time of processes and the value
of reducing or eliminating constraints that cause bottlenecks. This video shows the boarding
process and how SWA chose boarding priority schemes to shave minutes off the entire turnaround
process. It is recommended that students view the video “Gate Turnaround at Southwest Airlines”
in conjunction with this video because the two videos describe processes that together are critical
to SWA’s operations strategy.
Essay or Discussion Questions Based on the Video
1. Analyze Southwest’s passenger boarding process using the TOC.
• Within each airline’s operations, there are time constraints to consider. Skycap or lobby
baggage check-in, security screening, boarding at the gate, processing a plane’s
turnaround, and air traffic control are all constraints and potential bottlenecks that must
be managed in order for airlines to be successful and profitable. Southwest Airlines is
• The boarding process can be thought of as part of an overall turnaround process: plane
arrives; ground operations process and boarding process take place simultaneously; and
plane departs. It is important for the ground operations and the boarding to be done as
2. Which boarding scenario among the different ones proposed would you recommend for
implementation? Why?
• The seven different boarding scenarios included:
o New family pre-boarding behind the “A” group of first-to-board passengers
o Family pre-boarding before anyone else but seating choices limited on-board to
behind the wing
• After extensive testing at its San Diego station at Lindbergh Field, the company chose
a hybrid of two approaches. Six boarding groups within the A-B-C grouping met all
objectives of the test, as did the new family pre-boarding behind the “A” group.
3. How should Southwest evaluate the gate boarding and plane turnaround process?
• Competitive priorities for the boarding process would include delivery speed and on-
time delivery. The boarding process must be capable of delivery speed to minimize the
negative effects of planes that arrive late. When planes arrive on schedule, it must also
be able to meet a scheduled departure within the 25-minute deadline.
• In a 2006 study, as part of the company’s continuous improvement activities,
Southwest examined seven different boarding scenarios to determine whether there was
a better way to board. Considerable data, including times taken with a stopwatch,
enabled a careful examination of each option. SWA experimented with each option,
controlling for such factors as the number and type of pre-boards, number of checked
bags, number of carry-on bags, whether there was a crew change, and the number of
passengers with connecting flights. As each option was introduced and tried, customers
4. How will Southwest know that the bottleneck had indeed been eliminated after the change
in the boarding process?
• Selecting a priority rule (seating scenario) can affect the capacity requirements of SWA
by decreasing throughput time at the gate and thereby reducing the need to have more
aircraft.
