People as Products: The Pitfalls of Six Sigma Passenger Processing

Devotees to the Six Sigma and/or Lean concepts will often adopt a “manufacturing mindset” and set about reducing variation and wastage in as many of their business processes as they can. Airport operations are no different and passenger processing is one the most operational focused areas to target under these concepts.

Almost five years ago, I was learning a great deal about Lean, in particular, but I was struggling with applying the concepts to the bulk of the airport operational environment. And then it dawned on my that the passengers were the product and moving them from curb to cabin (and vice versa) was our production line.

Whilst, from a theoretical point of view, this realisation opened up a lot of options for me, there are some dangers in forgetting that people are still people and that they comes in an almost infinite variety of configurations.

Quick Recap on Six Sigma Objectives

The sigma in Six Sigma relates to variation with the goal to achieve acceptable results in 99.99966% of cases. Generally speaking, the goal is to minimise variation throughout your process to ensure a very high level of consistency. This consistency will minimise mistakes and costs and maximise quality and customer satisfaction.

In the airport passenger processing context, we want to turn a member of the public, into a passenger with a boarding pass, cleared to leave or enter the country, carry goods permitted by duty requirements and screened for prohibited items (or some combination of these).

I’d say that the most immediate metric that nearly everyone is looking at is time. How long does it take a person to get through to the lounge (or even boarded)? Passengers want to know for planning, airports want to know for resourcing and airlines want know for on-time performance and much more. There are other metrics including compliance related items for security and border control agencies.

The Analogy Starts to Breakdown

In the manufacturing world, the acceptability of the final product is often measured in physical attributes - size, shape, colour. The variations in these attributes are the things to be minimised in an effort to achieve six sigma. And one of the tools available to manufacturers looking to ensure consistency in output, is to tightly control the consistency of the inputs.

I had the fortune of working at an airport that had a very high percentage of frequent flyers, from the same industry (mining) with many even from the same company. Managing an airport for a mining company to support the Fly-In, Fly-Out workforce for its and other companys’ mine sites meant that a vast majority of our passengers where weekly flyers, carrying little baggage, were able-bodied and very familiar with our processes.

In terms of metrics, I think the most telling was our Explosive Trace Detection (ETD) rates. Under the random, continuous approach to ETD interventions, our security officers would be able to process selected passengers at a rate of 40%. The industry standard was 20% but with generally compliant passengers that were familiar with the process, and professional security officers, we would regularly double the expected rate.

Not every airport has this “luxury” and we have to take people as they come.

Infinite Variation

Each passenger-related process already manages to accommodate an enormous variation in peoples’ physical conditions. Some systems aren’t perfect but many airport’s have robust systems around mobility-restricted passengers.

We also try to work with variations in passenger knowledge, meaning do they know what we are doing with them and how they can help us get it done? We try to provide intuitive layouts, signage, video and audio message and people to help guide them in the right direction.

But how are we doing with respect to psychological variations?

A person’s ability to process the onslaught of information coming at them in the airport environment can be greatly impacted by psychological factors such as anxiety or sensory sensitives such as those associated with autism spectrum disorders.

Smoothing Out Some Variation

Whilst airport operators can’t avoid these variations there are some things they can do to help smooth them out.

For anxiety, some airports having introduced emotional support animals and some airlines permit the carriage of personal ESAs.

For those with sensory sensitivities. autism or learning disabilities, airports and airlines may wish to provide airport journey cards such as those produced by Learning Rose.

(c) Learning Rose

These cards can be used by passengers and staff to increase their understanding of the airport environment and the processes that passenger will go through. They combine pictures and simple sentences to inform and warn passengers of the steps in each process, the sights, smells and noises that might be encountered and what they might be required to do. These cards are currently being used by British Airways and are available for purchase from their website.

The founder of Learning Rose, Rebecca Taylor, won the Anna Kennedy Entrepreneurial award for Autism in November. Rebecca also does speaking events and, according to their website, recently spoke to some European airport managers about making their airports more autism friendly.

Contribute to the Conversation Below

This is not a subject I am overly familiar with so I would love to hear about other people’s experiences in the comments below or via email.

Image credits: Header - (cc) Negative Space on Pexels, Cards - (c) Learning Rose, & Screening Points - (cc) Dan Parsons using silhouettes from Needpix.com