Month: December 2007

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Adventures in Airline Travel

Today I flew from my home in the Seattle area to New York’s La Guardia airport. This seems to nearly always be an adventure, but this one was unusual, so I wanted to comment on the customer’s perspective.

The flight routed through the airline’s major hub in Minneapolis (MSP) (so now you know which airline if you fly at all). No sooner than I had turned my cell phone on at the gate at MSP than it buzzed. I answered, and it was the airline’s computer talking.

I was informed that my flight from MSP to LGA had been canceled. This is never good news. I was informed that I had been re-booked on another airline (Midwest), and to contact the gate agent before going to the other airline’s counter. I was read a confirmation number, though sitting in an airline seat I really had no opportunity to write anything down, and was informed that all of the details were available on the airline’s web site – which is really no help unless I am on line in the airport. No big deal.

The gate agent is polite, lets me know that the other airline is “way over in Humphrey Terminal” and suggests another flight into Newark. “No, that’s OK, I want to go to La Guardia.”

I was much more concerned, at this point, about my luggage. Airlines, in general, do a reasonably OK job recovering from these things and getting people where they need to go. As a group, however, they don’t seem to “get” that it is important to the passengers (at least important to this passenger) that the luggage get there more or less at the same time I do.

I was cheerfully told that my luggage would be on their next flight to LGA, and I could pick it up “at my convenience.” This choice of words was interesting, it implied that I would easily just head back to the airport when my luggage got there.

One of the blind spots of all airlines is the illusion that the airport terminal is the final destination. Their job ends once they unload you there.

My only other option was to fill out a “missing luggage” claim with the secondary carrier (since they are responsible as the last airline I flew on), then they would get with the original carrier, arrange delivery to the hotel, etc. I pretty much resigned myself to having to go through that nutroll, and hoping beyond hope that it would get to the hotel overnight so I didn’t have to show up at Corporate HQ in “Seattle Casual.”

(I should relate the story of lost luggage when I had an 18 hour stay in Berlin sometime…)

Midwest Airlines flight 5 from Minneapolis to La Guardia stops in Milwaukee. When we arrived, we were informed this 30 minute stop was going to be a 2 hour stop due to “weather delays” in La Guardia. Not sure what that was about, the weather in La Guardia is beautiful tonight, but whatever. We actually got “release” after 1 hour, got on the plane, and headed east.

One thing I have to say – Midwest has a nice little niche service, and features “the most comfortable coach seating in the industry” by their claim. The seats certainly are nice, and I can’t complain about warm, gooey chocolate chip cookies either.

When I got to LGA, I thought “what the hell”, grabbed the shuttle bus and headed over to the NWA terminal to just see if they even knew where the luggage was. I arrived, was walking toward the luggage service office and there, coming out of the conveyor was my suitcase. How the hell that happened, I will never know. I picked it up, headed out of the terminal, caught the shuttle to the rental counter, waited behind the couple who could not rent a car because HE had the credit card and SHE had the driver’s license, got my car, and here I am.

Short Story: Somtimes good customer service happens purely by accident. It shouldn’t, but sometimes it does. Of course, the airline industry does a very good job of managing my expectations (i.e. keeping them low). I am always pleasantly surprised when they manage to deliver what they minimally promised.

Note To The Airlines: I try to not be one of those people who abuses the carry-on rules. If I have too much stuff, I check it. However – as a customer, it is important to me to arrive with my luggage. Sometimes that it more important than getting to the destination as soon as possible.

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Really Long Takt Times

One question I see coming up a lot in various forums is how to deal with issues unique to very long takt times. By “very long” I usually hear about many hours, sometimes days, occasionally weeks. Because it comes up fairly often, I thought I would take a shot at addressing it here.

I think the biggest hurdle for people to get over is the issues are largely the same as shorter takt times. They are just harder to see because the work starts to lose a human time scale. The trick is to get it back onto a time scale that people can relate to.

By this I mean that a person, generally, loses a sense of how long something is taking once it goes beyond a dozen minutes or so. In contrast, the stereotypical automobile line has a takt of about 60 seconds. Once an auto assembly worker loses 3 or 4 seconds of time, there is really no way she will be able to complete the programmed work cycle without help or stopping the line for at least a few seconds.

As work cycles get longer, though, the work remaining until “done” gets more and more disassociated from “now” and the idea of the necessity to maintain a particular work pace becomes abstract. This is less of a technical issue than one of human psychology. People, in general. tend to believe they can finish something in time long after that is no longer true. (Ask any college freshman working on a term paper.)

The countermeasure is the same as a manager would apply to any long project: milestones.

When the takt times are relatively short, the “milestones” are the takt intervals themselves. Each takt time signals a stage of work that must be complete. If this is not true, the line will (should) be stopped at that point. (Remember – “Never pass along a defect” and this includes incomplete work.) The problem will be corrected, and the cause understood. Oh – actually this is not quite true. A Toyota assembly line has the work zone divided into 10 sub-intervals, and the worker has a good idea what work should be completed at what point.

However, since most of us are likely just beginning – If your takt time is longer than a couple of dozen minutes, then, define the work in stages. In one operation I suggested the following:

Take about 85% of your long takt time, and divide that into quarters. Define what job should normally be complete by the time each of those check points comes up. As an example – if the takt time was 100 minutes, then determine the expected work completion at 20, 45, 65 and 85 minutes. Give the Team Member a way to know where he is at that point vs. the expectation, and a way to call for help if he is off by even a little bit. He should also call for help before that point if he is disrupted by something that he knows will cause a delay.

This is just a starting point to start to stabilize the system and build your support structure. If you reach the point where things are running smoothly at this level of granularity, then cut those time intervals in half.

At each point you will find more problems. The problems are likely to be smaller, but there will be more of them. All of those problems are sources of friction, and therefore wasted motion and time, on your system.

BUT – before you start down this road, have a few things in place first.

  • Establish credibility for the concept that you are genuinely doing this to see problems that are making the worker’s jobs difficult. If you use it, just once, to initiate a negative consequence for “not working fast enough” then forget it.
  • Actually work the problems. This means work them to eliminate the causes. Put in a process for managing the problems, make it visible so that the people working can see you are working on them. Again, this is to maintain credibility. If problems get recorded and sunk into a black hole (like a database in a computer somewhere), then you are not assuring the people on the line that you actually care.
  • Build your immediate responses (escalation) system. This mean team leaders (first responders) who can, and do, respond to help calls quickly. The only thing worse than having no way to call for help is to call and have no one respond. Again, the system loses credibility after about the third andon pull with no response.
  • Don’t worry too much about every detail within the work interval. The important thing, at first is to make sure that the same things get done within that interval. Detailed sequence standardization will come in time.

Summary: The key to managing really long takt times is to break the work into time-based intervals, and manage to those, rather than the entire work cycle itself.