Supply Chain Management In The Boeing Company

In the early 2000s, The Boeing Company faced many challenges with increasing competition in the commercial aircraft market. To remain competitive, they began the development of their 787 Dreamliner aircraft using an unconventional approach in terms of supply chain management. The historical approach that Boeing used on previous aircraft designs required Boeing to procure raw materials and subassemblies from several different suppliers and manufacture the final assembly in house. Dreamliner sought out to be the first of Boeing 's kind to outsource 70 percent of its major subassemblies under a Partnering for Success initive (5) , leaving Boeing to assemble the final assembly performed in-house. Build airplanes the same way the automobile industry

Over time, Boeing took several actions to address these challenges. [1] This effort will include an assessment of supplier progress in meeting their commitments to deliver more complete assemblies on subsequent airplanes. Additionally, Boeing 3] inserted some additional schedule margin for dealing with other issues we may uncover in testing prior to first flight and in the flight test program." [7] The Boeing Company today announced a series of executive leadership changes and a restructuring within Boeing Commercial Airplanes to better align resources across its development and production programs and strengthen oversight of its global supply chain. "The steps we are taking today will sharpen our management focus and bring our organizational structure to bear to improve execution in our supply chain, as well as on our development

As a result of the events of Dremliner, Boeing has improved their supply chain management process by incorporating continuous improvement strategies and implementing ways to encourage open lines of communication amongst their supply base. Boeing 's supply chain management places emphasis on on-time deliveries and streamlining common standard processes across their suppliers. Boeing has developed several tool to not only monitor and audit the best practices and overall performance of the supplier, but aid in collaborative communication amongst their entire supply base.

One of the issues with Dreamliner was the late involvement of Boeing 's awareness of supplier related isuses. To improve in this area, Boeing uses the Supplier Performance Measurement Report to monitor and measure the eperfomrance of their supply base with focuses on " first-time quality and drive long-term, systemic improvements". THis system places focus on weather the suppliers have appropriate management systems and quality management systems in place, not just on-time dileverys and quality products. Supplier Quality Information System (SQIS) Communication of Quality Management System (QMS) tracks the audit findings are reported on a Supplier Evaluation Report (SER). BEST Boeing Enterprise Supplier Tool is a “summary” of a Boeing supplier’s performance for Product