Following Southwest Airlines' systemwide implosion over the holiday season, experts and novices alike hastily pointed fingers at one or more causal failures. Looking deeper, a number of interrelated issues—from managerial to technical—contributed to the perfect storm during a not-so-extraordinary storm. Rather than simply indicting the airline, we should consider how any business might mitigate the risk of a similar meltdown.
But as Kelleher purportedly told an MBA class in the mid-80s: A well-treated, loyal, and well-trained staff will do things to recover operations when weather, air traffic control, or other factors screw up the works.Many experts contend that Southwest’s point-to-point model, as opposed to the hub-and-spoke model used by other airlines, contributed to the difficulty of rescheduling resources.
These stovepiped and non-automated systems may have worked fine when Southwest was a small regional carriers, but not today when it’s become one of the world’s largest airlines. As an enterprise grows, manual processes that worked in the past can become an Achilles heel.
Moreover, businesses must be able to handle large swings or spikes in demand, and not just seasonal ones. This ability to handle widely fluctuating demand is a primary reason why some business have transitioned from fixed capacity in-house systems to dynamically elastic cloud solutions.
Especially, “older patched software is subject to technical debt,” says Raden, also the founder and CEO of Hidden Brains Research, “Airlines, which were early adopters of automating optimization models, are particularly susceptible to technical debt, but Southwest’s predicament is extreme.”