I am in the sky lounge at the JFK terminal two and because of the weather conditions we are all stranded here for a while. Several people have been here for like 24 hours. People are having a strain, whatever. And I was thinking about the connection between this and world-class manufacturing. So, imagine this that Delta airlines in this case, they have a problem. It’s not caused by them. It’s caused by weather, weather conditions. They can do anything about the weather, but they seemingly have a system to work on this. People are trained. People are trained to take care of people who are upset or are disturbed, you know, because they can’t get home to their loved ones. And when they need to go to work and everything like that, and they’re calm and they are explaining and all that.
There’s a training behind that.
This is not by chance that this is happening. Imagine this, you have a thousand flights or so that suddenly gets cancelled in a day. Now you might have a hundred-people calling in from those flights. And this means a hundred thousand people are going to call in to your customer service that you weren’t aware of. So how do you handle that? There’s a system behind that. There’s a system to plan for a new flight. And for example, in my case, my flight is now grouped. So, I have a much, much bigger aircraft that can bring much more people over to Atlanta. And, this is obviously something that didn’t come up with yesterday because the guys at work just came up with an idea here because they were clever. I’m sure they are clever people, but they build system because they know the weather’s going to hit them.
Just like the problems that are carriers in any sort of manufacturing industry. There are similar problems, not necessarily the same, hopefully, unfortunately, is the same as well, but similar problems that occur. But if you have a systematic approach to handle that, it means that you can just execute a pre-defined process to handle the situation, as supposed to get stressed and worried about what happens when you get stressed and where the people come and complain, you might react very negatively to that because you think that you are a victim of circumstance, et cetera. So, I just want to point out the fact that people here are calm. Even the passengers are calm because the people are calm around them. And the Delta is working hard on getting everybody to where they should go and they have a plan for it just like you should have a plan for situations that you run into. And if it never happens – cool. But if it does happen, you just have to execute. People have already trained for a much easier life. People can stay calm and concentrated and make fewer personal mistakes. Thank you.
Johan Majlov, Founder and CEO Lean Dimensions International