Southwest Airline Company’s Case Analysis
Measuring capacity and utilization
For companies of the Southwest Airline capacity, the capacity and utilization can be measured by managing the sizing and timing strategies, economies of scale, and scientific and systematic accommodation decisions. The Company has attracted many passengers to its airline in terms of measuring the economies and diseconomies of scale. As a strategic company, the airline has internalized these aspects to position itself in this segment. Besides, Southwest Airlines has positioned itself to emphasize the difference between its products and its competitors. The central system for measuring capacity at Southwest Airlines is in seat-miles. Thus any reduction in the turn-around time for an aircraft would translate into additional seat-miles. Southwest Airlines has efficient knowledge and experience in the uniqueness of products and services regarding their requirement in the sensitive airline industry. Its business operations’ main variables are connected at a central point by strategic planning, which encompasses cost, speed, quality, flexibility, and dependability to create a smooth continuous operation tracking model from one segment to another. The employees are much organized and ensure that aircraft maintenance, fuelling, cargo delivery, and other logistics support flow in a linear form.
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Factors impacting turn-around times
Unstable standard of operations management at the airline may have detrimental impacts on the turn-around times. When the system not quality-oriented, the entire chain coordinating different activities at Southwest Airlines would result in unstable operations. Although operations management systems experience constant metamorphosis due to short-term, midterm, and long term goal planning, no company can operate efficiently without quality system functioning. Thus, the quality will quantify the optimal functional within a competitive advantage parameter for the Company. Besides, high standard operations management score acts as the engine that supports implementers of business strategy to comprehensively verify the rationale for supporting current, predicted, and actual results for every step upon introducing a functional system. Thus, the Company has to track the decision science, optimal operations, and customer relationship to ensure continuous and smooth growth in its airline business.
The probability of success is far much better than that of failure when the operations system is appropriately designed to accommodate the business dynamics, such as changes in weather and emergency situations. For instance, the Company has a similar fleet of Boeing 737s for uniformity in maintenance, operations, and passenger capacity. Reflectively, the decision made the activities during the turn-around time easy to predict and manage since the same person can manage the entire fleet without requiring any additional skills. Besides, the airline has the advantage of being able to accurately schedule the crew in a flexible manner. Thus, the success of the turn-around times will depend on how well the Southwest Airline is prepared to handle emergencies and business dynamics while remaining relatively competitive and reliable to the customers.
Goal achievement tracking
The Company’s operations management systems incorporate planning, development, implementation, and discovery. Reflectively, the process captures organization chart, status reports, process map, compliance requirements, review structure, activities, dates, and resources employed within a specified period of time. The system has remained efficient due to consultative decision science, which has ensured the Company’s survival for more than three decades. For instance, there is a performance tracking system that monitors the costs of running the aircraft, the time it takes to maintain the plane, and the general flow of activities from one unit to another.
This process is inclusive of the scientific aspects such as a technical process of understanding the operations involved in operations management, their application, and evaluation criteria, which is monitored by the Department of Transport (DOT) department in the airline company. The Southwest Airline has fully established a mechanism of monitoring progress at the micro-level, and majorly depends on macro auditing in decision making with minimal risks. Reflectively, the DOT has the duty of tracking any complaint from customers, departures made on time, and cases of luggage mishandling reported. The airline has targets for each of the above dimensions. The progress of each size is communicated to the employees on a monthly basis.
Long-term issues in managing capacity, revenues, and customer satisfaction
In order to achieve quality operations management, Southwest Airline’s existing forms of system monitoring should be periodically upgraded to introduce multiple operating system models such as ratio analysis in operation management that is compatible with tracking and research within and without the Company. Basically, the operations management systems at the airline company include an aspect of cost, dependability, speed, quality, and flexibility. These variables determine success or failure in business. These variables are achievable through value delivery, value addition, and creativity. Reflectively, these concepts are techniques and tools essential in the art of operations management.
The second strategy for performance measurement should be aligned to the communication channel in the Company. For the implementation of the system, the management should balance the short term and long term consideration towards decision making. The government should ensure that long-term obligations are fulfilled, there are continuous innovations in the production of new products, and a series of intensive researches in the market are well-financed.
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