Which is more important to you – the first or last bag?

It never ceases to amaze me. You’re at an airport, you check-in and then wave goodbye to your luggage. When you arrive at your destination you expect your luggage to arrive on the luggage carousel at the same time you.

I met an old friend last week who was telling me about a situation he faced a few years ago when working on a project at an airport.

The aim of the project was to improve the business process of unloading the bags from the plane and getting them onto the luggage carousel.

This is something we take for granted but the logistics involved are not always that simple and passengers can quickly get frustrated if they don’t get their luggage within a few minutes.

One of the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) in place to measure the efficiency of the process was the time it took to get the first piece of luggage from the plane to the luggage carousel.

Now whilst this may sound like a sensible KPI, it was also used to determine the bonus that the luggage handlers would get (the quicker the luggage was delivered the higher the bonus).

Unfortunately for the management of the airport it was also open to abuse.

It may seem obvious now but what was happening was that the baggage handlers were getting the fittest member of their team to literally grab a bag from the hold of the plane and run to the carousel so that the time between landing and the “first luggage on the carousel” was minimal.

Meanwhile, all of the remaining pieces of luggage would be unloaded at a much slower pace.

The end result was happy baggage handlers but unhappy passengers!

Needless to say management soon identified this and the KPI was changed so that it was now the time taken to unload the last bag rather than the first bag that was important.