Case Study: Southwest Airlines achieves optimized on‑time performance and fleet efficiency with Tableau Software

Southwest Airlines maintains on-time flights and optimizes fleet performance with Tableau

Southwest Airlines, the U.S.’s largest domestic carrier with 700+ aircraft and about 4,000 daily flights, faced fragmented data across legacy systems (Excel, Access, Oracle, Teradata, etc.) and 28+ departments, which made it hard to get an enterprise view of operations, on‑time performance, and maintenance status. Siloed, inconsistent data slowed decision‑making and prevented real‑time insights needed to optimize schedules, fleet health, and customer experience.

Southwest adopted Tableau to enable self‑service analytics and a single source of truth, scaling from 3 to ~2,900 active users and deploying 400 Desktop licenses across 36 departments. Real‑time dashboards (updated every 15 minutes for OTP) and consolidated visualizations improved maintenance monitoring, route and capacity planning, fuel tankering decisions, and reservation center forecasting—cutting reporting time, surfacing new revenue and cost‑saving opportunities, and publishing over 2,000 workbooks that boosted collaboration and morale.

Southwest

Troy Roskop

Manager of Aircraft Reliability