SCHEDULE ALIGNMENT

By Steve Murphy
Senior Consultant

As a consultant, I travel … a lot! Therefore, I take advantage of the on-line check-in system and print my boarding pass at home. With a carry-on, I’m through security and on my way. However, a couple of weeks ago, I was unable to utilize the on-line check-in or the self-service kiosk, necessitating a trip to the ticket counter for assistance.

As luck would have it, this was a Monday morning (the busiest business travel time of the week) and there were 20 people in line ahead of me and only one ticket agent. The gentleman behind me who was a regular business traveler volunteered that this was usual for a Monday morning. After finally receiving my ticket, I inquired as to why the counter was so understaffed. The agent responded that there were four agents; one was sick, one was on break, and one was currently attending to a luggage problem. Pondering this, I asked her how many agents were scheduled for Tuesday, and she answered “Four … it is always four.” Shaking my head, I took my ticket, cleared security, and ran to catch my flight.

When I arrived at the gate, I had the chance to talk to the gate agent about my check-in encounter. He informed me that the airline had trouble getting people to work the early shift, in part because Monday mornings were so hectic. He admitted that they had approval for a set number of positions which would be lost if they were not filled. Therefore, they had more staff than needed at other times during the day.

Once I settled in for my flight, I started thinking about the check-in experience and what the gate agent had told me. As is my nature (as well as my profession), I started analyzing the situation to identify the root cause and subsequently a solution. In this case, it wasn’t hard to determine that the airline had failed to forecast demand or, in the best case, did not schedule staff to meet the forecast, failed to plan for absences and breaks, failed to align schedules with customer needs, and was unable to hire full-time people to work Monday mornings.

To be fair, I am basing these assumptions on hearsay, innuendo, and a very limited sample of the airline’s operations. Therefore, it may be more accurate to say the airline failed to execute an effective business strategy to meet customer expectations at that particular airport. Regardless, under-staffing during some periods and over-staffing in others resulted in inconsistent and poor customer service.

The failures outlined above are not unique to this one airline’s staff in this one airport. There are many service centers today that face the same challenges, and on a much larger scale. How many times have you called a service center and had to wait several minutes to talk to a customer service rep only to call back later and have your call answered immediately? This is often a symptom of misaligned scheduling.

In many cases, this misalignment results in over-scheduling during the main business hours which may mask the inefficiencies during the fringe hours. Many of the service center executives I have talked to know they have a problem but are unable to put their finger on the cause or the solution. Typically, this is because they are looking at it as a resource supply issue (quantity), not a resource allocation or workforce management issue.