From the pointed pen of Peter Guest:
Many years ago a man spent most of his working life selling parking equipment. He was a good man and highly respected in the industry. Because he had worked for so long in one industry he was considered an expert although his expertise was really only in one aspect of the business. One day he visited the guys at Toy Town airport, who operated thousands of parking spaces and said "Hey, I know a better way of doing this. Instead of operating one coordinated service with staff, short, medium and long-term parking you should segment the parking to address every segment of the airport business with a distinct and different service. More than that you can then contract out each part of the service individually and maximise your return".
Now the people at Toy Town Airport knew about airplanes and knew that they could make a lot of money out of parking. This guy was an expert so he must know more than them so they started to disassemble the parking service and contracting out different parts to different contractors. At one stage this resulted in two car parks next door to each other serving the same people which caused more than a little confusion to the users. With the service fragmented efficiencies of scale started to go out of the window. The two car parks each sent a medium sized bus to the terminal every five minutes instead of one big one, doubling staff costs and increasing running cost. Indeed at the start one operator bought buses that were so small that at busy times their clients had to wait for two or three buses before they could get a ride. Operators that should have been running a coordinated service started to compete. "Why pay a premium rate for medium term parking when you can use our long-stay parking for less and the bus ride is only a few minutes longer?"
This carried on for some years, they even fragmented the service further to create premium business parking lots and then one day the guys at Toy Town woke up and smelled the coffee as they say. Instead of managing one contract for parking they were running dozens. The central terminal area which was a traffic nightmare was stuffed with buses and really it just wasn't working. So here's a bright idea; why not just have just one contract with an expert company that knows about airport parking (you know their name even originally included the word airport)? And that's just what they did. One operator, a coordinated service and with a new start fewer less environmentally damaging buses, well the old fleet was worn out anyway and we might as well get the environmental kudos from buying new buses.
The moral of this story is probably in two parts. One, if you're talking to an expert make sure that they are an expert in what you're talking about. Two, if it's broke fix it.
Note: There is absolutely no relationship between the above and what recently might have happened at a large airport on an Island to the east of Dublin. Any similarity is entirely coincidental.
The moral of this story is probably in two parts. One
Posted by: abercrombie fitch shirts | 20 July 2011 at 06:30 PM