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| One of the key differences between services and manufactueres is the inability for services to store inventory. This has serious implications for response time, as described in Chapter 8. The inability to store finished goods inventory complicates scheduling for many services. If the value of the service, as determined by the customer, is dictated by its availability precisely when the customer wants it, the demand will be used to determine when capacity must be available. An excellent example of this situation is the scheduling process used by an airline. | (VIDEOssu1) |
| Airlines exemplify a challenge for many services in that they have many different resources that must be scheduled to meet a variety of different parameters. An airline must schedule a variety of limited resources, including planes, maintenance, and several different groups of personnel. In addition to the flight schedule needs, they must cope with federal regulations on "in-air" time, union rules, and home base locations of their staff. | (VIDEOssu2) |
| United Airlines has developed a sophisticated system for creating a flight schedule which then drives the schedule for other resources. This approach, using one master schedule to drive many schedules for resources that support that master schedule, is common in services and in manufacturing. For United, the flight schedule drives the maintenance schedule, the flight crew schedule, and the Airport/Manpower schedule. These schedules can only be created with supporting the flight schedule as their objective. | (VIDEOssu3) |
| The key to the development of the overriding flight schedule is the strategic objectives of United and how that strategy approaches the development of value for customers. Timeliness is such a key component of value that for many "commodity" products and services, it will be the order winner. | (VIDEOssu4) |
| United's system, like most scheduling systems, combines volume related information, like passenger demand and cargo data, with value related information like the expected level of service. This results in a balancing of the appropriate level of service with the demand. | (VIDEOssu8) |
| Demand for services is calculated as a "load" or number of hours needed for a given resource. This is then translated into the need for manpower, given the hours a person could work in a given time period. The same logic is used when scheduling equipment for a manufacturer. | (VIDEOssu9) |
| Once the flight schedule is developed, the maintenance schedule is developed next. If the maintenance schedule is not feasible, the flight schedule would have to be changed. | (VIDEOssu5) |
| After the maintenance schedule, the flight crew is scheduled. That is followed by the development of the airport/manpower schedule. | (VIDEOssu6) |