What is Southwest Airlines Location Strategy in Operations M

What is Southwest Airlines

Location Strategy in Operations Management

10 examples please

Solution

As Justin Bachman reports in BloombergBusinessweek, Southwest finished dead last in on-time flights for the fourth quarter of 2013, according to the US Department of Transportation. How is Southwest solving the problem? Steve Hozdulick, Southwest\'s senior director of operational performance, shared a few of the company\'s methods with Bachman. Here\'s what you can learn from those methods, if you\'re facing some delivery problems of your own.

That schedule, and an improving U.S. economy, produced more customers than the company anticipated and more-crowded planes, just as Southwest was learning how to operate a larger model in its network, the 175-seat 737-800. That model typically takes longer to load than the 143-seat 737s Southwest has traditionally flown. Add to this the cascading effects of a late aircraft in the type of nonhub network the airline operates, along with the winter storms that struck in December and January, and you wind up with only about two-thirds of Southwest\'s flights landing on time. In the fourth quarter of 2013, just 71.8 percent of its flights were on time--dead last in the industry.

But there\'s a silver lining for any business struggling to meet high customer demand: The high customer demand. From Southwest\'s perspective, 2013 was still a stellar year, despite the tardy arrivals. Southwest\'s fifth annual \"One Report,\" which stresses what Southwest calls the \"triple bottom line of performance, people, and planet,\" also came out last week. The positives included record revenues ($17.7 billion in 2013), more than 144,000 volunteer hours by Southwest employees, and an absolute decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.

Don\'t hide from the problem. You might think an airline would be hesitant to publicize problems with on-time performance. But Southwest isn\'t hiding. Hozdulick spoke to the media, and the article appears in plain sight on Southwest\'s news page.

Southwest airlines seems to be on right track with new strategy in place and arrivals 86% on time