Originally Posted by
GROUNDHOG
Whatever happened to common sense and customer service ...
"... many airlines don’t have customer service anymore, they have departments of customer compliance" Mike Boyd of Evergreen at the 15th Annual Boyd Group International Aviation Forecast Summit
Originally Posted by
rmac
"You can rest assured that Jazz......will have done their sums"..
No you can't !
I'm in private equity and we invest in a broad spectrum of industries and more often than I like so called "professional management" present sums to us that are total tosh...
The level of bankruptcy in the aviation sector tends to indicate that dyscalculia is particularly high amongst airline managers.
Originally Posted by
PAXboy
If I recall correctly, in the late 1970s (or early 80s) the Volvo motor company changed their production line.
Instead of having small groups repeating one section of manufacture, they trained the small groups to make a motor car. Each group started with (effectively) a box of bits and worked with the car all the way through until it drove off the end of the line. Then they started again.
As a result, staff morale hit the roof and the quality of the vehicles improved greatly. The cost increased. As I understand it, when the company was bought (by Ford, I think) that all changed.
I sit to be corrected on any of the above as i could not find any online reference to it.
While unable to confirm or deny the above, the converse is certainly true, as exemplified by the disastrous "streamlining" of production at Waterford Crystal in the 1990s. There, "family groups" of glass-blowers, apprentice cutters and master craftsmen were separated into more efficient manufacturing units. Of course, one benefit to the company was supposed to be a reduced workforce so a reasonably generous voluntary redundancy package was offered to one and all.
On paper, it first looked like a great success: the workforce was reduced by about 30% and the savings were considerable. Until it became clear that most of that 30% was made up of master craftsmen who promptly set up shop on their own account. The now efficiently industrialised Waterford Crystal could not respond to being attacked in every one of its traditional markets because it was left with a cohort of partially-trained apprentices and eventually collapsed into a banal, largely out-sourced, label.
Airline revenue/yield management is frequently held up as a Sacred Truth, but it appears to be entirely founded on the 1970s needs of buiness travellers. In reality, survey after survey shows that this group of passengers typically makes up around 15-25% of overall seat sales. Any other retailer would concentrate their efforts on catering to the majority and adapt their product accordingly.