Varolii Corporation, the interactive, personalized business-to-consumer text, voice and email communications, has announced that it has partnered with Southwest Airlines to streamline its process for matching pilot availability with flight needs. Using the Varolii Interact platform, Southwest Airlines uses SMS text messages to more efficiently and effectively alert pilots of flight scheduling opportunities. Based on Varolii's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, Southwest Airlines' Open Time Alerts (OTA) helps the airline quickly staff unassigned flights, ensure on-time flight operations and reduce costs from a less efficient, manual process. In cases of illness or other circumstances that prevent a pilot from attending their scheduled flights, airlines are left with "open time," or an uncovered shift, that must quickly be reassigned. Prior to implementing the OTA solution, Southwest's crew scheduling departments had to make hundreds of manual phone calls each day to pilots to fill open shifts. Schedulers were also required to follow a specific call sequence, starting with the most senior pilots, which created lag times from waiting for responses before moving on to the next pilot on the list. This not only wasted resources, but made it difficult to efficiently schedule pilots for unfilled flight times. With the Varolii Interact platform, Southwest's OTA solution provides pilots with an opt-in program that delivers SMS text messages directly to their mobile devices to alert them of open flights and give them the real-time opportunity to opt-in to staff specific flights.
Open flight crew management system for Southwest
