Jan Marshall, VP of Technology and CIO, Southwest Airlines presented on the Southwest philosophy – employees first and customer focus – that has led it become the today’s largest US airline (#flights) with a reputation for being THE golden standard for employee relations (yet interestingly the most heavily unionised too). Its not a coincidence therefore that they have been profitable for the past 36 yrs, have the lowest number of customer complaints, have never had layoffs… I liked the philosophy of “Employees 1st – leads to happy employees – leads to happy customers – leads to happy shareholders”. I also smiled at the fact that they don’t have all (rigidly enforced) “business rules”, but “business guidelines” that are overridable by employees as required!
As part of their “customer first” approach SouthWest are always looking to improve the customer experience – and improving airline operations using CEP (through TIBCO BusinessEvents) to provide decision support for gate operations is one such application.
Jan made one particularly interesting comment: the seams between customer service and operations were blurring — in other words customer events affect operations and allow them to adapt to improve customer experience…
Another interesting TIBCO BusinessEvents customer keynote – although I expect Jan was a little nervous of saying too much in front of the high number of other airlines in the TUCON audience! Another interesting observation by Jan was they they consider their Operations app to be part of the first wave of CEP apps in their business.
