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.

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