What if you could take a commercial airline flight any time, and anywhere you wanted to go? Just show up at the airport without the need to consider time schedules or layovers. Aside from the potentially cost-prohibitive nature of such travel, there are also constraints in the airline system that preclude this kind of operation from the lobby check-in process through to boarding at the gate and processing plane turnaround. the process of operating the airline Ls filled with constraints that must be managed in order for them to be successful and profitable. Flight schedules are tightly orchestrated and con­trolled, departure and arrival gates at airports are limited, and individual air­craft have seating capacities in each section of the pane, to name a few. Southwest Airlines is one company that has figured out how to manage its constrains and generate positive customer experiences in the process No other airline can claim the same level of profitability and customer satisfaction Southeast regularly achieves. What is its secret? Talk to any loyal Southwest customer and you will near rave reviews about its low fares. great customer service, and lack of assigned seating that gives customers a chance to choose who they sit next to onboard. From an operations perspective. it is much more than what the customer sees. Behind the scenes, operations managers carefully manage and execute-3,400 hates a day in over 60 cities in the United States-a process designed 0) manage all potential bottleneck areas. Southwest"s famous rapid gate-turnaround of 25 minutes or less demonstrates how attention to the activities that ground operations must complete to clean. fuel, and prepare a plane for flight can become bottle­necks if not properly scheduled. In the terminal at the gate, passenger board­ing also can be a bottleneck if the boarding process itself Is not carefully managed. Since the individual mix of passengers present a different set of issues with each flight that often are not evident until the passengers actu­ally arrive at the gate, ranging from families with kids and strollers to large quantities of carry-on bags and passengers needing wheelchair assistance, operations managers must be ready for any and all situations to avoid a boarding bottleneck while also assuring a pleasant and stress-tree gate experience for all passengers In 2007, as part of the company"s continuous improvement activities Southwest focused its attention on the passenger boarding process to determine whether there was a better way to board. Its existing process consisted of three groups. A, B, C, with no assigned seating. Depending on passenger check-in and arrival time. passengers were given a spot in a group Those fist to check-in received choice places in the A group Last to check in ended up in the C group. and usually had a choice of only mid­dle seats in the back of the plane upon boarding. As passengers arrived at the gate, they queued up in their respective boarding group areas to await the boarding call.

Seven different alternate boarding scenarios were designed and tested. They included

• n New family pre-boarding behind the "A" group of first-to board passengers
• Family pre-boarding before anyone else but seating choices limited on-board to behind the wing
• n Six boarding groups (within A-B-C groups) instead of the original three A- B-C groups
• Assigned boarding gate line positions based on both boarding group and gate arrival time
• n Single boarding chute at the gate, but up to nine groups all in one queue
• Boarding with a countdown clock to give customers an incentive to get In I ne and board quickly, incentives given out if everyone was on time
• Educational boarding video to make the boarding process fun, inform passengers how to board efficiently, and provide the company another way to promote its brand.

QUESTIONS

1. Analyze Southwest"s passenger boarding process using the Theory of Constraints.
2. Which boarding scenario among the different ones proposed would you recommend^for vrplementation⁹ Why?
3. How should Southwest evaluate the gate boarding and pane turn around process?
4. How will Southwest know that the bottleneck had indeed been eliminated after the change in the boarding process?