Random Notes on AirAsia

Self check-in kiosk

I was on a business trip to Sabah last January. As the management wanted to cut cost, I was ‘forced’ to fly with AirAsia, the budget airline.

I decided the give AirAsia’s self check-in service a try. You know, Tony Fernandes is doing everything to improve efficiency and cut cost. If passengers check-in by themselves, the workload of the ground staff would be reduced. Ideally, this should speed up process at the counters and help the airline to cut cost. AirAsia’s website declares:

Our self check-in service gives you a quicker, more convenient way of checking-in. Now, you can choose to check-in at your convenience by using your mobile, at our airport kiosks or via the internet… We assure you it’ll be quick, convenient and easy to use. Try it now!

Thing didn’t turn out so rosy. After checking-in at the kiosk and obtaining the boarding pass, I still had to check in my baggage at the counter. And on that day, the queue at the ‘baggage drop counter’ was longer than those at normal service counters!

Self check-in is useful if we do not have baggage to check in. But with tight security imposed at the airports these days, how often can we fly without check-in baggage?

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AirAsia used to hire only female cabin crew, but now it has started to observe gender equality. In my return trip from Sabah, two out of the three cabin crew were males. Unlike the stewardess, who wore red, the male cabin crew wore black. I don’t really like their black uniform. And, apparently, I prefer pretty stewardesses to handsome stewards

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I saw an AirAsia stewardess closed the cabinet door with a kick of her heel. C’mon, can you please be more feminine?

McDonald’s Location Strategy

I prefer Burger King’s Whopper to Big Mac. But in the last one year, I went to McDonald’s more often than Burger King.

The canteen of my company sells mainly spicy food. As I want to cut down on spicy food intake, I often have my lunch outside the company, and the most convenient location is a McDonald’s restaurant attached to a petrol station. (Many people point out that fast food is not good for health, but I believe spicy food is worse.)

While its competitors’ outlets are mostly in shopping malls, McDonald’s has diversified in terms of locations. It has set up many stores at petrol stations. Other than being more convenient to working people like me, there are several other advantages:

• Unlike the restaurants in shopping malls, McDonald’s at petrol stations can be opened 24 hours.
• They can offer drive-through service.

Now you know why McDonald’s is the world’s number 1 fast food chain…

WARNING: Drive through service can be bad for the environment.

Candlewood Suites

When I worked in California a couple of years ago, I stayed in a hotel called Candlewood Suites in Garden Grove.

My room was pretty well equipped. There were TV, CD player, kitchen, microwave oven, coffee maker, refrigerator, dish washer, iron and ironing board. I could use the washing machines (outside the room) for free, though I needed to buy detergent. A gym was located on first floor. The rate? Less than $40 for anyone who stayed longer than a month. (It should be higher now.) That was cheaper than most motels.

How could Candlewood Suites offer so much at such a low price? In most hotels and motels, housekeepers tidy up our room everyday. In Candlewood Suites, they came once a week. That was hardly a problem for me, as I was used to making the bed myself. If I wanted extra soaps or towels, I could get them from the front desk. If a guest checked in late, he or she could collect the key from a safe deposit box. By reducing the number of employees, the hotel was able to keep the operating cost low, and the saving was passed on to the guests.

The catch was, of course, one had to stay for at least a month. If you are merely visiting Disneyland in Anaheim – just next to Garden Grove – motels are the better choice.

Wages are high in the United States. Anything self-service is cheap.

AirAsia X Flies to Gold Coast

AirAsia X, the long-haul budget airline and a sister company of the original AirAsia, has launched its inaugural flight from KL to Gold Coast.

With just one aircraft – a leased Airbus A330-300, the AirAsia X offers four flights a week to Gold Coast. When interviewed by the The Star’s reporter, chief Azran Osman Rani said,
“It’s going to be great. With one plane, I won’t have to worry about planes sitting idle on the runway.”
(The Star, BW13, Nov 3, 2007)

Just ONE aircraft What will happen if it breaks down

My parents, sister, brother-in-law and two nephews visited Gold Coast recently. (They flew from Singapore.) The Qantas plane which they were in was unable to take off. Qantas put the passengers in a later flight and arranged for the accommodation of that night in Traders Hotel. On top of that, the airline also compensated the passengers.

I am not sure what AirAsia X will do if similar thing happens to them. Chances are, passengers will need to postpone their flights until the only aircraft of the budget airline is fully repaired. That may take more than one day. Or AirAsiaX may refund, but that won't save our vacation plan . And if the airline offers to pay for accommodation, it will be in Tony Fernandes’s Tune Hotel.

But there is a bigger concern. If AirAsia X can’t send its only plane to hangar for maintenance and service, will the risk of air tragedy increase

Mr Datuk Fernandes, please do not compromise on air safety.

Management Lite & Ezy 42 – When & Where to Inspect

In manufacturing environment, control of process is needed to make sure a system is producing at the expected quality level. Control is often done by inspection, which can involve measurement, tasting, touching, weighing, or testing of the product. Its goal is to detect a bad process immediately.

Inspections, or audit, can take place at any of the following points:

1. At supplier’s plant while the supplier is producing.
2. At your facility upon receipt of goods from the supplier.
3. Before costly or irreversible processes.
4. During the step-by-step production process.
5. When production is complete.
6. Before delivery from your facility.
7. At the point of customer contact.

In my earlier post, The Toyota Way, we learned that team leaders in the car giant’s plant stopped the assembly when they detected quality problems. Inspection was done during the step-by-step production process, as noted above.

Reference:

Jay Heizer & Barry Render, “Operations Management”, 8^th edition

Management Lite & Ezy 39 – Ohno’s Seven Wastes

In lean production, waste refers to anything that does not add value to a product from the customer’s perspective.

Taicho Ohno, the Toyota’s executive who spearheaded Toyota Production System, identified seven categories of wastes which are to be reduced or eliminated. They are:

1. Overproduction – producing more than the customer orders or producing early (before it is demanded) is waste. Inventory of any kind is usually a waste.
2. Queues – idle time, storage, and waiting are wastes.
3. Transportation – moving material between plants, between work centers, and handling more than once is waste.
4. Inventory – unnecessary raw material, work-in-process, finished goods, and excess operating supplies add no value.
5. Motion – movement of equipment or people that adds no value is waste.
6. Overprocessing – work performed on the product that adds no value is waste.
7. Defective product – returns, warranty claims, rework, and scrap are wastes.

Reference:

Jay Heizer & Barry Render, “Operations Management”, 8^th edition

The Toyota Way

Russ Scaffede was the vice president of Powertrain for Toyota when it launched the first American powertrain plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. He had worked decades for General Motors and had excellent reputation as a manufacturing guy who could get things done and worked well with people. He was excited about the opportunity to work for Toyota and to help start up a brand-new plant following state-of-the-art TPS principles. He worked day and night to get the plant up to the demanding standards of Toyota and to please his Japanese mentors, including Fujio Cho, who was president of Toyota Motor Corporation in Kentucky.

Scaffede had learned the golden rule of automotive engine production: do not shut down the assembly plant! At General Motors, managers were judged by their ability to deliver the numbers. Get the job done no matter what – and that meant getting the engines to the assembly plant to keep it running. Too many engines, that was fine. Too few, that sent you to the unemployment line.

So when Cho remarked to Scaffede that he noticed he had not shut down the assembly plant once in a whole month, Scaffede perked up: “Yes sir, we had a great month, sir. I think you will be pleased to see more months like this.” Scaffede was shocked to hear from Cho:

“Russ-san, you do not understand. If you are not shutting down the assembly plant, it means that you have no problems. All manufacturing plants have problems. So you must be hiding your problems. Please take out some inventory so the problems surface. You will shut down the assembly plant, but you will also continue to solve your problems and make even better-quality engines more efficiently.”

When I interviewed Cho for this book, I asked him about differences in culture between what he experienced starting up the Georgetown, Kentucky, plant and managing Toyota plants in Japan. He did not hesitate to note that his number-one problem was getting group leaders and team members to stop the assembly line. They assumed that if they stopped the line, they would be blamed for doing a bad job. Cho explained that it took several months to “re-educate” them that it was a necessity to stop the line if they want to continually improve the process. He had to go down to the shop floor every day, meet with his managers, and, when he noticed a reason to stop the line, encourage the team leaders to stop it.

- Jeffrey K. Liker, “The Toyota Way”

From this short excerpt, we can learn quite a few of Toyota’s business philosophies and operations practices.

First and foremost, we can see Toyota’s emphasis on quality. In General Motors, managers avoided shutting down the assembly line because this would cause production to slow down. In Toyota, however, they were willing to sacrifice numbers for quality.

In most manufacturing plants, quality control inspection is usually done on finished goods. In Toyota, team leaders stopped the assembly line when they noticed a quality glitch, and fixed it immediately. They wanted to get quality right the first time.

The instruction to stop the line came from the team leaders, not the plant manager. This was another philosophy at work: employee empowerment.

Cho told Scaffede to “take out some inventory.” This is because inventory hides problems. When inventory level goes down, the problems are exposed. Toyota strives to lower inventory level as it adopts the Just-in-time (JIT) strategy.