The Travel Business is now moving too fast for manual and outdated processes.

Southwest has flights to over 100 destinations in 40 states including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. This has all been accomplished without using the hub and spoke system of other major airlines, in favor of a point-to-point system combined with a rolling hub model in its base cities. The airline has more than 60,000 employees and operates about 4,000 departures a day. As their markets continued to expand, their legacy technology proved unable to keep up with their business needs.

Once they engaged with RPC, we transformed their legacy Access database into an automated, mobile-friendly global compliance management system. Our team of experts worked with the Southwest product owners to understand their current state and what their vision for the future to produce our product roadmap. After analyzing their corporate technology stack, we made a variety of custom web/mobile software development, reporting and custom infrastructure implementation options that could work within their enterprise. After discussions with their internal IT department, we narrowed the tech stack down to what was best for their future scaling abilities and corporate IT integrations.

After 6 months, we had our MVP up and running and started beta testing with select markets. Using agile development practices, continuous integration and deployment methods (CI/CD), we continued to test the product over the next few months before going live. Once we confirmed the application was bug free and optimized to scale, we rolled the system out company wide. RPC has remained a strategic partner for 6+ years designing, building and supporting 24/7 a variety of business units that are critical to the success and safety of the airplanes. With over 3000 employees and vendors using the applications daily, Southwest can now more efficiently track each step of the process to better service their planes and keep their customers safe and comfortable.

Why Southwest Chose RightPlace

Expertise:

RightPlace was chosen in part based on our expertise with web based applications and leading development practices - but also because of our ability to create great cloud-based solutions. While considering the cloud as part of the enhanced infrastructure, RPC’s extensive experience with hosting and 24/7 support solidified the decision that they were the right partner to deploy and manage a real-time cloud-based application.

Customer first model:

As with the beginning of every new relationship, we are relentless on customer intimacy, learning all the details of the customer’s current state and to become acutely aware of their existing business process. This made RPC the right choice to deliver on new business initiatives and become a long term strategic partner.

Technology Choice:

Here at RPC, we know there are many different technology choices out there and picking the right combinations can be a challenge. We are truly technology-agnostic and always implement a variety of technologies that are the best fit for each customer’s unique use case.