Operations Management

Operations Management at South West Airlines

Management 7010

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Southwest Airlines Co is a major US airline headquartered in Dallas, Texas. The airline is primarily known for providing short haul, high frequency, point to point and low fare service. Southwest commenced operations on June 18, 1971 in Texas with three Boeing 737 aircraft serving Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. As of July 2014, Southwest schedules service to 89 cities in 41 states. Southwest enjoyed 30 years of profitability and in the year 2003, the airline was named by Fortune as the one of the most admired companies in US.

Southwest Airlines is a public company that provides airline/aviation services to customers. Being a part of the service sector, the company’s operations are characterized by high customer interaction. Meeting or exceeding expectations of customer calls for efficient and effective application of management process in 10 decision areas of operations management. The analysis presented below evaluates the application of operations management principles at Southwest Airlines.

INTRODUCTION

Operations Management plays a critical role in determining the success of Southwest Airlines. The remaining part of the paper provides an in depth analysis of application of operations management principles in key areas namely operations and productivity, operations strategy, project management, forecasting, managing quality, statistical process control, capacity planning, location strategy, layout strategy and inventory management.

Although Southwest ….

OPERATIONS AND PRODUCTIVITY

Being in the aviation industry, Southwest airline must focus on providing efficient services to the customers. In order to accomplish this, it is imperative that Southwest affectively apply concepts, tools and techniques of Operations Management. As described in the textbook, an organization must perform three functions in order to create goods or services. These...