Case Analysis of Denver International Airport Essay

Case Analysis of Denver International Airport - Essay Example When it finally opened to the public 16 months behind schedule it has 5 runways and 88 gates and in many ways represented a model airport for the future. According to the master plan the airlines tenants were expected to install their own baggage handling system, thus excluding the construction of a baggage handling system by the overall DIA project. Subsequently, United Airlines insisted on an automated high-speed baggage system. The Denver officials designed a large scale baggage handling system at a cost of $193 million that would require no manual labor (Ma ¨hring, Holmstro ¨m, Keil & Montealegre (2004). The design was intended to run faster and more reliable than traditional technology. The root cause of the problem is that the city failed to properly plan for the construction of the new DIA airport. They moved ahead with the designing and construction of the airport with out the input of the customers. The root cause of the problem was the faulty planning. The first and foremost reason was that the baggage handling system was not decided at the initial stage. It was a subsequent addition by which time the basic design had already been approved. In addition to the late decision of building the automated baggage handling system, during the development stage, the airlines kept changing their requirements. This led to frequent changes in the design and construction. The power systems for the revised design were not altered, which led to overloaded motors and finally mechanical failures in the system testing. The optical sensors also did not read the barcode properly which caused the system routing problem. BAE had been appointed to design and implement the automated baggage handling system. At the same time, BAE, United airlines and the City of Denver, all has their own consultants and project leaders. BAE enjoyed the reputation of being among the best and on the strength of its good