Here’s a sign that your industry is ripe for a technological overhaul: Last-minute scheduling is sometimes handled by old-fashioned phone trees, with human schedulers making hundreds of phone calls a day to fill open slots.
That was the case at Southwest Airlines (NYSE: [[ticker:LUV]])—at least it was before a new text-messaging program supplied by Seattle-based Varolii helped push the quirky budget carrier’s system for last-minute scheduling into the mobile age.
Ten months later, some two-thirds of Southwest’s pilots have opted into the system to alert them about extra shifts. And Varolii, which recently raised $8 million in growth financing, is looking at ways to expand this new use for its mobile-messaging technology, possibly adding everything from flight attendants to ground-based package pick-up services.
Here’s the backstory: Like any other business, airlines sometimes have holes pop up in their employee schedule and need to find someone else to pick up the slack. Common enough—but that problem is a lot more complicated when you’re dealing with flights that have to leave on time, and a unionized workforce that doles out work based on seniority.
Southwest’s existing approach, Varolii vice president Andrea Austin said, included a website where pilots could check for open flights. But the airline also might have to turn to a call-down list in some cases, running through lists based on seniority until a pilot or co-pilot’s seat could be filled.
Varolii had already been working with Southwest, handling things like text-message alerts for customers and employee messages to spread word of shutdowns in emergency situations, like the landfall of Tropical Storm Irene earlier this year.
So could Varolii help tackle the pilot-scheduling problem? In one sense, adapting Varolii’s technology to that task wasn’t terribly complicated: In the broadest sense, you just point it at pilot data instead of customer data. The pilots can text back to claim a shift, problem solved.
But the particulars of having a union workforce definitely threw in some wrinkles. As mentioned, seniority is a huge issue. Mucking it up could cause big employee problems for Southwest, so
