GA 201 | How to Apply Lean to the Airline Industry with David Acklin

And we were very fortunate because we thought initially we're going to try to take about 15% out of the number in the first three months and we actually end up taking 75% of missed bags out of interline process for Hawaiian, at least in the first three months.

Have you ever lost luggage or had your luggage delayed when traveling by air? I have, and it's not fun. Well, my guest today definitely agrees having luggage issues isn't a good thing. And lucky for any of us that may travel through Hawaii, he actually did something about it. His name is David Ackland. David works at Hawaiian Airlines and recently completed a project that focused on improving all aspects of what they call interline baggage. Now on today's show, David and I explore this project in great detail. We talk about how they managed to get other airlines to join in on the improvement efforts, as well as how finding countermeasures to the problem and was actually the easiest part of the whole thing. The show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything David and I discussed, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 201. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean Learning system over@gembacademy.com with a fully functional trial. Now let's get to the show. All right, David, well, welcome to the show. How's it going?

It's going great, Ron. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you. So it's we were talking before we hit record that you're in Hawaii and I'm in Texas and It's a nice 10am for me, but it's 6am for you. So thanks for coming on so early. Have you had some coffee?

Yes, I am. I'm well caffeinated and ready to go.

Good, good, good. All right. Well, thanks again for coming on and, you know, I'm excited to have you on. We've talked about this for some time when you were going through all of the trading here at Gemba Academy and really, really been fun getting to know you and watching you kind of make incredible improvements there at your company. So I guess first of all, tell us a little bit about your background, David, maybe how you first came to learn about continuous improvement and then definitely tell folks where you work now and what you're up to these days.

Oh, certainly. So thanks for the introduction. Just a little bit of background then to get started. I actually came by way of my first Deming book and that's where it starts for me. And so a lot of my Quotes we'll talk about are Deming based in graduate school. So over 20 years ago, really got introduced to continuous improvement and came at it more from an engineering management or engineering perspective, but have gradually moved over fully to CI where I now am at Hawaiian Airlines, a lean Six Sigma black belt, and I'm assigned to airport operations. So I get to spend all my days down with the aircraft and the teams or at the gates with, working with the guests, our passengers, and absolutely love the job.

Now talk a little bit about the program there at Hawaiian Airlines, maybe. How long have you guys been practicing continuous improvement? And maybe just generally speaking, how do you think it's going?

It's actually going very well. We've been able to get quite a good deal of recognition with both our senior leadership and board of directors recent. And to give you a little context to your question, we been a department for about three years now, and it started out with two black belts that worked in specific departments. So we're although we're a centralized model, we're decentralized in the sense of a belt is assigned to a department. So it started out with someone assigned to maintenance and engineering and someone to the commercial area. And then we had our director come on board and she started to really expand our program so that now we have six belts across different departments. And so I'm the black belt assigned to airport operations just for content. That means I have all above and below wing process work that I work with the airport operations leadership team. And the projects that we do are based on that. So the program, though, has grown steadily and in addition to that, we started training our green belts about a year and a half ago, and that's where we really became introduced. Ron is using Gemba Academy as our subject matter expertise, our support with the videos, with the materials, the quizzes, so that we would just then layer on our 40 hours of classroom time that were really airport or airline specific work and then walk them through their projects towards an internal green belt certification. So we now have, I think about nearly 35, almost 40 people, depending on how you count where they are in their projects, certified. And we have another class of about 27 folks that we're going to start training this year.

Yeah. Well, it's been fun working with you guys and really an honor to work with you. So I guess thank you for your business, first of all.

Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely. So let's jump in, maybe share your favorite Deming quote.

Absolutely. If you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing. And I love this quote because this really embodies to me so much of what my first conversation is on a new project. And I asked everybody, it's like, okay, great, tell me what the problem is and what, what are you doing? What's the process? And invariably it sends or ends up being something, well, someone does it this way, someone does it that way. There's no standard. So then we move to the let's go see the Genshi Ganbutsu idea. So we go out and we have a look, and that's where we start our mapping and try to get some data and start the DMAIC process. So to me, that really kicks it off for the first set of questions I have with any new project.

Yeah, well, one thing that I've really appreciated about the way you go about things, David, is, you know, just when we were going through your project and mentoring and coaching and just how much time you spend, you know, where the work is being done. And I think that's just so important. And sadly, a lot of times doesn't happen. You know, a lot of projects are done at somebody's desk, punching on minitab and looking at fancy graphs or whatever it was. And there was a time and a place for that. But at the end of the day, we have to go to where the work is being done and observe. So you've done a great job with that.

Well, thank you, Ron. Thank you.

All right, well, let's. Let's jump in a little bit on maybe the topic of the day, which is interline baggage. Right. So I think we're going to talk a little bit about a problem and what you did about that problem and just kind of walking people through that journey. So maybe to understand the problem, give it a little context, what the heck is interline baggage for us layman folks out here?

Absolutely. And I would have to say just over a year ago, I never really thought about baggage that much. But interline is really the exchange of baggage between carriers, and that goes back to the idea of codeshare. So you've all seen this. When you've been at the airport, you look up and you see a flight that has multiple different names. So you might be boarding a Hawaiian flight, but it's also a Korean Airlines flight and a China Airlines flight and a United flight and a Delta flight. And that's the difference between a marketing carrier and an operating carrier. And so when you have that relationship and you check your bag through and let's say you want to come to Kauai, but you fly through Honolulu. You're going to fly here from say Dallas on American to Honolulu and then connect on the Hawaiian flight. That's where we interline the bag so it comes from American to Hawaiian to then be carried forward to Kauai for your vacation. So any exchange of baggage between carriers is interline and then to really sort of dip into where that problem goes or what was happening at the airport here in Honolulu is we were decentralized and there are many airports already set up where they have centralized inline. So everybody brings it to a central location and picks it up and takes it back. So you get this star diagram. And what we didn't have was any type of effort there and what we found were a lot of delays in getting baggage from other carriers and vice versa. So we were going through this problem and we didn't really see it yet until we started to sort of dig at it. And I think that that's where you know, you and I Ron, we talked about the spaghetti diagram and what we had initially done based on one of our senior directors comments to say, you know, why don't we do this like LA or you know, another airport. And we went out and started interviewing drivers and then we drove their routes and said okay, I'm going to United carrier delivery person and I'm going to stop here, here, here and here because of how they code share, I might go to the ANA and then I different carrier and then to Hawaiian and so each carrier is making multiple stops and then you multiply that by 15 carriers at Honolulu and next thing you know you get this spaghetti mash. And I didn't have a good, better than back of napkin picture but it's one of those things I should have kept where it literally was a bowl of spaghetti of route and driving. So that's where we initially tackled the start of the problem.

But to just generally speaking what was the problem like? Was it like what, what was, was it like late flights or lost bags or what were some of the issues there?

Yeah, when, when the, the bag and the passenger obviously traveling separately but the passengers self directed we always sort of say they can run from this gate to that gate if the flight's late.

Yeah.

Or behind. But the bags, what, what we did when we also were interviewing is we were observing and recording and looking for our bags. They were getting aggregated large and you might see a carrier that's way down here and they're going to say, you know what, I've only got two Bags for Hawaiian. I'm going to wait. I'm going to. I'm going to wait till I get a cart full and I'm going to make it worth my trip. And then they drive down. Well, that's 45 minutes. An hour later, and they may have already missed their connecting flight. So when you get these close connections, like 90 minutes for domestic. And so we don't really get a chance to get it, sort it, you know, scan it and bring it in our system through our bag room and get it on the right flight. So the bag gets late. And that's the issue. I mean, we all have missed a bag at one point, and what we're trying to do is obviously avoid that. So we want to get the right bags on the right flights. And what we're finding from that spaghetti diagram and from interviews was that where people just, they weren't getting their bags over and they were just aggregating and sort of turning into a bulk process, if you will.

Okay, so you spent quite a bit of time, and I already know some of this stuff, so I'm just kind of asking questions for the listener because they weren't part of our coaching calls. But. So you spent quite a bit of time understanding the current state and really, like, really deeply understanding the problem, I would say. And then obviously, this wasn't just a Hawaiian Airlines activity, right? I mean, you needed other folks to be involved, namely other airlines who may or may not be as interested or, I don't know, experience, whatever the word is, with continuous improvement. So what did you do? Like, how did you approach that? How did you convince other airlines to kind of be part of this improvement effort?

Absolutely. It's a great question. And we started with data, and we traditionally. So I have to take a step back and go back forward to answer the question. Is we, from our misbag reports, we do a lot of reporting to the DOT based on that. And we, we were aggregating it by airline and then by station. So we just basically would say our station had this much of a number, but we weren't really breaking it down by type, but we had all of it. We just had never mind it. And that was a lot of your help. And also from the classes and the work on STATS is working with our baggage expert to really say, okay, show me everything that comes from our big three carriers, our other regional carriers, our international carriers. And we broke it down exactly by airline, but then also by flight, by time of day, and said, look, here's where we see the problem, guys. And because it's a codeshare, it's your guest. Even though they're ending our trip, you know, their trip on, on us, it's still a Delta ticket or Japan Airlines ticket. So the guest is coming back to you. Yeah. Often angry and complaining. So here's the data. Here are the number of bags, here are the problem flights, here's the time of day. We see that you fall behind. And we were able to really paint a very accurate, hyper accurate picture of where the gaps are and what we need to do. And we actually were able to get almost everybody on board. And that's the beauty of any airport committee is you only need a majority to make a vote. And that's where we got them to say, okay, we're boating, we're going to support centralized interline. And then we just had to shop for. And then we found an old belt that had fallen in disrepair. We repaired it and we said, there's the central location. It is, it's in the middle of the airport. And so that's how we started our operation to kick it off with the airlines. But data won the day.

Yeah. So talk about those, those early conversations though. So you had this data. Did you talk to the other airlines individually or was it like brought, you know, six of them, representatives from different airlines into a room and kind of presented it at once. How did you do that?

Well, that's where we sort of dip into our nemoashi. So we went around the tree and we went to each airline and we knew who the more influential airlines based on the total traffic at Honolulu. So we went to them and sat with them individually, one by one and walked them through the process and walked them through our understanding of their process, their bedroom, just to say, would you be in favor? Does this make sense? So that we got to the airline committee, we already knew who was going to stand up and speak up and say this is a great idea. We knew we had the votes. I mean it almost sounds like a story out of Washington. Right?

Yeah.

Where we said, okay, great, we know we're going to get the votes. And then we knew who our problem carrier would be. There was really one that was resistant. And we continued to work on them and they've finally come along months later. But it really was, it was politicking and vote getting at the most base level of meeting with operations people and even our union leadership as well to help get them on board.

I don't want to be too nosy and obviously don't want you to name any names. But can you share anything about the group that was resistant and maybe why were they resistant initially? Was it just fear of the unknown or. I don't know, because I think that's a real situation that many practitioners deal with. Right. They find people who are resistant.

So maybe out of courtesy, I'll name some that were very positive and then we can deduce from there. What we found is once we got Delta and Japan Airlines aboard, which are big carriers in Hawaii, we quickly were able to get American and ANA and then some of our more regional or smaller size international carriers. So what we ran into on that point of resistance actually wasn't the management of that other carrier. It was that it was their union was very resistant. And so at that level of not wanting to drive or just outright not doing the job, the beauty of it turns out, and that's why we engaged our union leadership, is we have the same union, the IAM and the shop stewards and shop leadership or the lodge leadership are some of the same people. So when it got down to it and said, we really need to press this, guys. We really need to work on this, we were able to go through the union to assist and support the process. And by then we'd gotten the union on board at Hawaiian to help us out. Because the first concern when we went through change management with the union was they were going to lose work. Said, actually no. We actually increased headcount. And that was part of also our selling pitch to the airlines is a centralized inline belt is not staffed. So we said, you know, what is going to staff it? We're going to add some headcount. We're going to have agents down there from this time timeline and we'll watch the bags. And that was partly due to when it turns out, we looked at all the data from everybody else. We also had the predominance of bags, so we're already there anyway. So for us to say we'll be the security, you know, sort of the oversight was not a big step.

Yeah. You know what's interesting about even this podcast and reflecting on your project, we spent a lot of time so far talking about deeply understanding the problem, the current state. And then really, we spent a lot of time getting everybody on board, getting everybody committed to the, to the effort. And, you know, as we've talked about many, many times, David, that's the hardest part of any improvement project. We often joke that, you know, fixing the problem is kind of the easy part.

Right?

Absolutely. The tools are easy. Right. I mean, just go Implement whatever flow, pull, whatever it might be, that there's videos and whatnot, but getting. Getting folks on board and really understanding the problem. That's where I would say 99% of the folks out there trying that aren't succeeding, that's where they fall down. And I think that's where you excelled.

No, I. Thank you very much. I couldn't agree more. Our change management, it was critical. It was absolutely crucial working with the other airlines, but also internally and, you know, out of fairness, you know, we do a good amount of reflect. And so we very much practice with Kaizen Hansei. And in that, we did go to the frontline staff. We worked with a key group of our chiefs and leads, but it wasn't everyone. And it's really hard when your workforce is hundreds deep or even thousands deep to touch every person and convince them why or let them see why. And so we still had pockets of individual agent resistance who just didn't believe it was going to work and they wanted to change it or do something to it themselves. But it got down to. To your point, we've talked about this. You get that core group excited, your champions, and then you get them assigned to the work that day, and then it works beautifully. And then you sort of bring in slowly, some other people, at least at the agent level, to get indoctrinated on why it works and how the process works and stay to the standard. That was some of the other we really had to focus on is getting people trained and keeping them on standard and keeping them managed that way.

Yeah. All right, so let's talk about. You got everybody on board or, you know, enough folks on board to make a go of it. What did you do? What were some of the countermeasures and how did you implement those?

Sure. I had mentioned briefly the idea was to find a central location, and we did. We found an old belt that had been abandoned some time ago, and it was roughly central. In the airport, we were able to get our leadership to commit to the cost of repairing it. So there was a little bit of a sales exercise there to pay for that. But once we got it up and running, we basically said, and to your point, the tools were quite easy. Hey, everybody, instead of going to individual carriers, just come here and drop the bags. And while you're here dropping the bags for us or anybody else, pick up your bags. And to sweeten the deal a little bit for the countermeasure or basically work is since we are already staffed, we'll take the bags coming from Hawaiian and hey, Delta, United, American, we're going to put them on the cart for you. You just have to drive by, drop the stuff for Hawaiian, attach your cart and drive off. It's that simple. And so that was really, at that point, that countermeasure of getting people involved. And once we did that, once the drivers figured out it was going to be that simple, then we had a really rapid adoption. We launched in about three days. We had everybody but one on board, which we talked about, and then we kicked it off. And the tools, they were remarkably unsophisticated. So it was just, come here, do this, do that. Bags are not that complex, so they don't talk back, they don't argue, just lie on the belt and go around. So once we did that, it was really quick. Once we got everybody on board, the predominance of folks on board and the drivers on board, it did really work. And we were very fortunate because we thought initially we're going to try to take about 15% out of the number in the first three months, and we actually end up taking 75% of missed bags out of interline process for Hawaiian, at least in the first three months. So it was wildly successful, more successful than we'd ever envisioned. But it also started to teach us how to think about all the data and look upstream and even solve and work on additional problems as well as downstream. So it created that ripple effect of clarity, if you will.

So your initial objective, or target, if you will, was what percentage improvement? 15, 15, 1 5. You got everybody on board, you made some countermeasures. Again, nothing extraordinary complex. Just you put some solutions, some countermeasures in place, and you achieved what, 75%. 75%. Wow. That's pretty incredible, David.

We didn't see that coming. We rejoiced and it has been sustainable. We had little bit of bump this month due to weather. Weather does impact baggage and flights and so forth. But we've overall, year over year sustained that reduction in interline. So we're really excited about that.

What did your. I don't know, what did your leadership think? I mean, 75% is pretty incredible.

It was well received. Our COO and then our VP of airports very much on board, very pleased with the results. And of course it's interesting, like any good leaders, like, wow, you did that for this. Now can you do the same thing for that? So we basically got other projects to work on with the same idea. And so we're chipping away at a more comprehensive baggage program. If you Will, which includes redoing how we scan and move bags for connecting Hawaiian flights from Hawaiian to Hawaiian and so forth. So they were absolutely instantly on board and went right to the next project. So we got to bathe in the glory for about 60 minutes and said, keep going.

Yeah. Now your only problem is you're going to do some improvement and you'll improve it by 50%, which is incredible. And they're going to be like 50. That's it.

Really?

That's it, yeah. Very good. Hey, so last question. As it relates to this project, if you could go back to the very beginning of the project and. And maybe kind of that time machine question that I've asked before and kind of talk to yourself, give yourself some advice before you started that project, knowing what you know now, would you do anything different?

Oh, absolutely. And it's again, change management. The tools, like you said, they were very simple, not hard. But the change management and I would have done it for the internal, for the Hawaiian employees, the agents, and we have briefings with every shift, and it's very hard to cover all briefings at all places for one or two people. So I think what I would have done is taken our champions, if you will, the initial group, and said, okay, we need to be at every single briefing every day for a couple of weeks and just really drill in. Here's the process. Here's why. Here's why we're doing this. Here's the cost that, you know, it averts. I mean, if we talk to them about that and maybe we can make it more identifiable to them. If you do this, happier guests, save money. Those are important things. But if you do this, your workload also goes down. That's the one thing I don't think they quite got. It made their work easier, it made it less. And we actually added headcount. So I would have done that. I would have been from the 4:30am Right on through to the last briefing of the day in the evening, we would have had someone there at everyone. And that's where we. I think we missed because we relied on that champion group to try to cover those. But we didn't stand there to make sure the message was thoroughly received repeatedly. And so that's what I do differently.

Fantastic. Well, great job again, David. Super proud of you and how hard you worked on that. And it was sure fun to work right alongside with you. So let's go ahead and jump into the reflection section. David, I got a few questions I want to run past you. So. So this first One is just more of a general question. When you think of the word kind of continuous improvement leadership, just those. Just continuous improvement leadership, what does that mean to you?

For me, and I guess how we practice Hawaiian too, it's really mindset. If I could take those words and transform that into something, I'd say it's the mindset or it's of the kind. It's the idea of Kaizen, Right. Where that's more of a mindset rather than Cairo, the physical improvements. It's the idea that you change your mind, that you're open to as CI leadership, or just the idea of being a leader in CI, open to new ideas and taking the emotion out of it and being able to set aside the baggage or the dogma of some of our things that we have and. And say, okay, let's try it. Let's have a look. Let's go see together. And I think that's a good leader in CI is someone who's willing to go to the shop floor, ask the questions of the people who really know and be open to change and be open to something that they've long held as dear and logical as being absolutely irrational in some cases. So that willingness to flip and be open.

Have you had the opportunity, David, to kind of practice some of this continuous improvement thinking, like at home in your personal life, anything like that?

Absolutely. You will laugh. So I am going through, of course, the LSS route and the belt and certification, but my wife is also a CI professional and she was trained up through the Toyota production system. And so while we have this very common lean language, we also have a very different view, maybe on statistical work, but how that really rolls down to, I don't know how many families actually have a visual management system. And we do have a WIP board for all our home projects. And we used good CI methodology on our home renovation last year when we managed our own contractors. So it. Yeah, but we still 5s the kitchen routinely, and we're still trying to find that sustainable model of this is where things go. It's a great experience. I think we take CIA home to a whole different level.

Very well. Maybe you have another episode and we'll talk about that.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right. Hey, so in your. I think I know the answer to this, but I don't want to assume anything. In your experience, where do you think people just in general struggle more with lean, with six sigma, just continuous improvement? Is it the kind of three potential answers? The first one, maybe the content, the theory, the philosophy of it, the Second one, maybe it's the deployment or the implementation or really what to do. And then the third potential answer is the structure, coordinating people, getting people working together. Where are those three, do you think people struggle with the most?

I think personally, it's change management and the implementation. But it's kind of a mix of your last two, implementation and structure. But it's getting everyone on board. And that might heavily biased by where I work. And I will say this so I give context for everyone listening is airport operations is a fantastic group of people who are wonderful firefighters. And they're, you know, give them a problem like this flight's late. This problem here, whatever it is, they will solve it immediately. But it's always solved within the context of right now and 15 minutes later onto the next problem. So it doesn't create a chance to go back and do a reflection of saying, well, why did that happen? Can we avoid that ever again? And what do we do to build a model to sustain it? And so there's a piece there that I think we struggle with here at Hawaiian is the stopping and reflecting on that. And we've had that conversation with our VP of airport operations, and he makes a great speech to our greenbelts every class about that. But I think in the end, to your point, once we get into the projects of it with all of our. Our new people we're bringing in through the CI model that they do, they get the tools, they even can get the philosophy, but it's sort of undoing that mindset a little bit. But it really is the implementation and the care for all the stakeholders that they didn't think about when they went through, so when they make a change, they forgot. And it's just getting that practice and understanding to have that really wide field of vision and make sure everyone's needs are addressed or that we avoid undue harm to someone we didn't even think about. I hope that fits into one of your three categories.

Yeah, no, great, Great. That does. Hey, so last question. What are you most proud of as it relates to your journey with continuous improvement?

You know, the thing that I am probably most proud of and maybe relates to a project like this is I was able to work with three other folks that were going through their green belt at the, as well as some other members who now have said, you know what? This is great. I want to join that and to see them develop and go from, like I said, that the great firefighters to now someone who can stop and pause and really reflect. There's one individual that has done really well. Randy Medina on our team who has now been able to use some of this data and go back to our, our consortium, if you will, a 4A, it's a group of airlines and say, you know, this is an issue, Interline's an issue. So when we talk to the dot, which he just did last week, we talk with data. We don't talk about opinion or what we think or it's not emotional. But he's become a real data wonk because of this and it's just so wonderful to see. So I'm very proud of watching some of our people grow and really get into that CI mindset and really embrace, go to the work site, get the data, verify fact. It's just fantastic.

I think you need to come up with some teachers called data wonks, you know.

There you go.

That's awesome. Very good, David. Well, hey, thanks for, thanks for coming on and sharing your story. Really, really honored that that you did that, David. And again it was awesome to work with you and look forward to staying in touch. Touch. Let's go ahead and wrap this episode up, David, with you, maybe sharing some final words of wisdom and then definitely tell folks how they can connect with you over social media or any other form.

Yeah, first, thanks Ron, very much for having me on. But also working with me on this project, it was the basis of my black belt and I really appreciate the guidance and I had a lot of teachers myself so I hope to have done a good job there. And you know, I've referenced it before and I referenced Deming as sort of my start. And so, you know, with, without data you're just another person with an opinion. My other favorite Deming quote and it was again, words of wisdom. If you show up at your meeting with good data and good understanding of what that problem is, you've gone to look and verify. Everybody tends to fall in line. It's really hard to argue against great objective data sets. Well minded and well reasoned. So I just continue to drum that into our green belts and continue to adhere to that. So I really appreciate that and I think that was a lot of the basis of our conversations too. So thank you very much for, for your help, Ron. Yeah, and I'm more than happy to chat with anyone so you can reach out. Best way to do is send an email to me at David ackland. That's a C K L I nawaiianair.com or you can find me on LinkedIn at the LinkedIn.com in David Acklan. And again, that's a C, K, L, A, N. Standard spelling. David, you folks can reach out anytime. And, Ron, thanks so much. Much. Look forward to our next project.

Yeah. Awesome. All right. Thank you, David. And you. Stay. Stay. I guess I won't say warm because it's always warm in Hawaii, but maybe stay dry. Get a little rain this time of year. I don't know.

Right? You know, we get a little rain. It got cold, it got down to 77. Oh, you.

You poor guy.

Yeah.

The struggle is real, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I had to wear a coat. It's always lovely in Hawaii. Come to visit sometime.

Yeah. All right, well, thanks again, David. Take care.

All right. Thanks, Ron. You have a great day.

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