“Bottom line is we now focus our team’s time on proactive and preventative work and increasing the digital employee experience and not waiting for issues to arise before focusing on them,” said Whisenhunt.
Southwest has been steadily digitizing frontline workflows for the past decade, replacing paper-based operational processes with mobile devices and cloud applications for its maintenance, flight operations, and gate services workers — and even cabin crews.
The Dallas-based company has largely digitized operations for its 72,000 staffers — two-thirds of which are in frontline roles — replacing the printed manuals used by pilots and ground operations teams with mobile devices, for instance.
At the same time, the switch to digital tools has placed even greater demands on IT: the Southwest end user computing team supports around 50,000 employee smartphones and tablets, 20,000 laptops, and 15,000 PCs.
