(Bloomberg) — Southwest Airlines Co. is enlisting outside help, including General Electric Co. and consultant Oliver Wyman, in an effort to prevent a recurrence of problems that led to days of flight disruptions last month.
(Bloomberg) — Southwest Airlines Co. is enlisting outside help, including General Electric Co. and consultant Oliver Wyman, in an effort to prevent a recurrence of problems that led to days of flight disruptions last month.
Oliver Wyman, a unit of Marsh & McLennan Cos., already has begun talking with Southwest employees at headquarters and airports most affected by the breakdown and with union leaders as part of its independent assessment, Chief Executive Officer Bob Jordan said Thursday in an interview.
“The goal is to get the best, most transparent understanding of what happened and what that infers in terms of what we need to do to mitigate the risk of this ever happening again,” he said.
Jordan said GE is working on an update to software Southwest uses with its system to schedule crews. That system was overwhelmed when the carrier fell too far behind in trying to move staff around as a winter storm left pilots and flight attendants stranded at airports, along with passengers. As changes piled up, Southwest was forced to make them manually.
GE said its software was not the root cause of Southwest’s scheduling problems, but the company is working with the carrier to help make its system more reliable.
“The GE Digital tool that is integrated into Southwest’s systems performed as designed throughout the event, and we are working with them to define new functionality as they improve their crew scheduling capability,” the company said in an emailed statement.
Those initial steps are part of a broader push by Southwest to fix issues before they cascade into another crisis like those it experienced last month and in the fall of 2021. The airline’s board also has created a special committee to provide operational oversight and to assist management in dealing with unplanned events. “Its role is not to be management, but to provide insight and directions around how we move through processing events,” Jordan said.
Read More: Southwest Crisis Reveals Clubby World of Airline Leaders
–With assistance from Ryan Beene.
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