Boeing today fired off a rebuttal ad to the EADS “Get Real” ad published right after it got back into the KC-X tanker competition.

Boeing also posted this message on its website:

The Boeing Company has taken our tanker technology trailer to 14 cities in 12 weeks to demonstrate why the NewGen Tanker is the best choice to replace the critical but aging Eisenhower-era KC-135 fleet. We appreciate the many visitors who have made time to hear our story and share their thoughts. While taxpayers do not decide which tanker will be selected, each and every voice needs to be heard on this issue. It is a significant economic decision that will impact America’s national security.

While the cost of the contract is estimated at approximately $35 billion, the value of providing future men and women who selflessly serve this nation with the most advanced tanker ever created is priceless. That is why this KC-X choice should become very personal to each and every citizen.

Let me share an example. Our Boeing trailer team showed up one Tuesday morning in Toledo, Ohio, to set up for another stop on our tour. We were met by a nice couple eager to check out the NewGen Tanker technology. They had been following this acquisition effort for years and were more than willing to express their opinions. More than anything else, they wanted us to clearly lay out why we have the best airplane and why the men and women working at existing facilities and on our supplier team should make this fleet here in America.

An important part of telling our story is setting the record straight when our competitor distorts the truth. We owe that to the many people who don’t have time to research the facts and hold them accountable. We owe that to the men and women who fly, fight and win in the United States Air Force. And we owe that to the incredible Boeing employees who build military and commercial jets for the world.

That’s why we are running a new ad. Our initial NewGen tanker advertising described the merits of our offer. But the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) took a different tactic and began attacking our airplane and the ability of Americans to deliver.

While we have no desire to go tit-for-tat, we will not accept a complete distortion of the truth. To borrow a line from the ad, “America’s warfighters and taxpayers deserve the real facts, the real story, and the best choice — the Boeing NewGen Tanker.”

EADS responded with this from its website:

EADS North America KC-45: The Real Tanker

Going Negative

When companies get desperate, they do desperate things. The Boeing ad campaign has pivoted.  No longer content to show concept art portraying what its U.S. tanker might one day look like if it ever gets built, Boeing today suggests in a full page Washington Post ad that EADS North America is actually the company that doesn’t have a working tanker – while showing our tanker in flight, refueling an F-16.

Contrast that with Boeing’s ads for its NewGen tanker, which label as “Combat Ready” an artists conception of a plane that has never been built or flown.

The Facts

Boeing’s NewGen tanker only exists on paper, and is profoundly different than any tanker it has ever built. The Boeing Corporation’s last tanker delivery to the U.S. Air Force was in 1965. Boeing has delivered – years late – four 767 tankers to Japan that do not come close to meeting U.S. requirements. Boeing is more than four years late providing a tanker to Italy, because it lacks fully functional refueling systems.

Don’t let Boeing distract you. Only EADS North America has a tanker that is flying and refueling today that meets Air Force requirements. When that changes, we’re sure Boeing will share a photograph of the tanker they are trying to sell the Air Force.

In the meantime, you can watch video of our real tanker in action – the same platform the Air Force will get, with the same refueling systems – at kc-45now.com.

Source: leeham news

This collection of recent quotes highlight that the airlines are not satisfied with the performance of either Airbus or Boeing. The critical issue of mis-servicing customer (internal and external) requirements, is rapidly becoming one of the most serious problems affecting the industry today.

Notice how Udvar-Hazy’s choice of wording has strengthened over the 2 years from 2007 to 2009; compare ‘optimized for the airlines not for the manufacturers’ and ‘I was so frustrated…’ alongside the 2009 statement ‘You cannot deal with companies that are unreliable’.

On 10 February 2009, Aero-News.net reported: ‘Udvar-Hazy, Branson Predict Rough Times For Planemakers’

‘Both Chide Boeing For Strike-Related Delays. Two of commercial aviation’s biggest names had sobering comments about Boeing Commercial Aircraft last week, marring what should have been the cheerful occasion of the delivery of a new Boeing 777 to V Australia…
‘Sir Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin group of airlines, appeared conscious his comments would reach both execs and workers at Boeing, and did not mince words. He commented on his new 777, which was supposed to have been delivered last year: “It was a horrible mess that Boeing was on strike,” he said. “We messed up tens of thousands of passengers over Christmas. We had to buy tickets on other airlines and scramble to get seats which weren’t available. The financial damage in an industry where the margins are minute is catastrophic.”…
‘Regarding Branson’s comments on Boeing labor woes, Udvar-Hazy added “You can’t deal with companies that are unreliable.”

Feb 2009, Seattle Post Intelligencer: ‘All-Boeing’ Ryanair considering Airbus order. The article reports that even after publicly stating in 2002 “Our message to Boeing today is, you keep building ‘em, we’ll keep flying ‘em and together we will beat the crap out of Airbus in Europe,” Ryanair CEO O’Leary is now considering purchasing Airbus.

2 May 2008, FlightGlobal.com: “[Emirates] president, Tim Clark… says: ‘We’re waiting for Airbus to complete its evaluation. The A380 deliveries are crucial to what we want to do, so if we don’t get them as planned, then we’ll have an acute problem.’” This statement was made after Emirate’s first 5 A380’s, originally scheduled for delivery in 2006 had already been delayed to 2009.

10 May 2007, New York Times, quoting Steven Udvar-Hazy of International Lease Finance Corporation, the world’s largest buyer of commercial aircraft for the airlines: ‘Mr. Hazy says he is not shy about telling Boeing and Airbus what to build: “We are saying to the manufacturers, ‘Here’s what the plane should look like.’ Our loyalty is to the airline industry that serves the public, and the product has to be optimized for the airlines and not for the manufacturers” … Before a stunned crowd at an industry gathering last spring, Mr. Hazy lowered the boom on the A350 and, almost overnight, killed the design. This followed months of private discussions with Airbus executives in which Mr. Hazy complained that the proposed A350 was just a “warmed up” version of an existing plane, and that its wing design made it too slow… “I felt Airbus was paying attention, but was not embracing our ideas. I was so frustrated with Airbus because they were stalling”… He has warned Boeing and Airbus that the days of their control may be numbered by the growth of the Chinese, Russian and Japanese aviation industries.’

Is there a future for Western commercial Aerospace industry?

Europe was this week devastated with the news that Airbus is to close all its European plants except its A380 superjumbo line. The economy of Hamburg will be badly affected, but less so than that of Toulouse where Airbus has been the only large employer since the late 1990’s. People are predicting a ghost-town in Toulouse, a city that already suffered from the wholesale out-sourcing of IT to India and China during the last decade. Already a spate of strikes and civil unrest has been plaguing the city. The social consequences of this latest news are frightening. But Toulouse is just one casualty of Airbus downsizing – aerospace is known for the complex network of organisations involved in the supply chain. Nearly every aerospace and defence company in Europe has been, and will continue to be badly hit by Airbus’ failures. The ramifications across Europe are enormous.

The defining event to which most industry observers point was the launch of the MRJ in 2008. This was the first aircraft for a newly formed Mitsubishi-Toyota joint venture, the organisation which subsequently became Associated Aircraft Producers (AAP), and significantly was the first commercial aircraft delivered on time in over 20 years. Not only that, but it met all its performance guarantees.

At launch the AAP20 reportedly had costs of production unmatchable by the A320 and 737 which meant that Boeing and Airbus were unable to match the price. AAP is quoted as saying that its advanced production techniques resulted in build costs of around 60% of those of its competitors.

Subsequent investigation into the decline of Boeing and Airbus reveals clues to the current situation were present more than 20 years before the MRJ and AAP came onto the scene. In the late 90’s Boeing brought in some of Toyota’s production system experts to sort out their B717 production facility in Long Beach, giving them firsthand knowledge of how to run a large commercial aircraft final assembly line. Around the same time, in the late 90’s Toyota began recruiting aeronautical engineers and in 2002 was spotted testing its TAPA, a 12-seat composite-fuselage jet over the Mojave Desert, USA. In 2005, just as Toyota was about to displace GM from its 70-year perch as the world’s number one auto-maker it reportedly had more money in the bank than all big-4 US automakers put together.

Now with the benefit of hindsight we can see the effects of the blinkered views of Boeing and Airbus executives around the turn of the century: They clearly believed they were in a two-horse race – the Airbus strategy had for some time been “Beat Boeing”, Boeing responded to the upstart Airbus by whingeing to its government about subsidies being given to Airbus, almost causing a trade-war between the USA and EU.

With Airbus attempting to develop more programmes than it could manage, Boeing was set to reap the returns from the 787. What happened next is the stuff of legend: Development and production problems beset the 787 like no programme before it. Some Airbus executives have claimed that Boeing tried to do with one giant leap what Airbus had gradually been stepping through over the previous 20 years.

By the time the first AAP20 was delivered, neither Boeing nor Airbus were in a fit state to respond, both dealing with lack-lustre sales/deliveries of their new aircraft and their cash-cow workhorse market decimated.

Leaving aside the global strategic and political issues, could Boeing and Airbus have done anything themselves to reduce the future damage? Most industry commentators suggest that they could, but it was a case of too little, too late.

This 20-year-old quote from Fujio Cho, then president of Toyota Motor Company comes to mind: “We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes – while our competitors get average or worse results from brilliant people managing broken processes”

This is an extract from the article, “Is there a future for Western commercial Aerospace industry?”, by Jeremy Tranmer

Is there a future for Western commercial aerospace industry the complete article

About the author

Jeremy Tranmer is a consultant in operational performance improvement to international aerospace and defence businesses. He is a partner with Game-Change Consulting.

www.game-change.com

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Game-Change Comment

These days, it isn’t enough for a company merely to cut costs.

It needs to streamline robust processes while improving the quality of products and services. Becoming  a nimble organization—one that blends best practices, continuous improvement, and evolutionary change while increasing profits.

Enter Lean, a concept that designs, manufactures, delivers and supports products more efficiently and at lower costs — while systematically identifying and eliminating waste — all the way through the product life cycle. It uses a “just-in-time” system that gives internal and external customers what they want, when they want it, and at the lowest possible cost. The five principles of Lean are a set of leadership and decision making principles that define excellence: Customer Value, Value Stream, Flow, Pull and Perfection.

Six Sigma compliments this methodology, focusing on driving to perfection all business, technical and operational processes and results. It encompasses defect prevention, variation reduction and mistake proofing through the use of data driven tools.

The merging of these two methodologies has been the basis for several aerospace and defence Lean initiatives such as Airbus Power 8 and the recently launched Eurocopter SHAPE program. With considerable time and attention being devoted, and now fast becoming a major priority for most Aerospace senior and front line managers, scores of employees have been trained in Lean and Six Sigma tools and techniques leading to on the job application to drive business unit, functional, corporate objectives and ultimately, profitability.

I recently instructed a training class of about twenty European Aerospace industry senior managers in Lean and Six Sigma principles. At the end of the week long session, their was positive engagement and “buy-in” all round and we talked at length about the benefits of promoting the learning company-wide. In exuberant mood, I posed a question to the group, to be answered individually in a round-table discussion.

“What are your next steps for your respective department/function/business unit to promote Lean implementation”

After a dozen or so responses, the following key themes were notable;

“This is not a company priority for us at the moment …”.

“We haven’t been told by our management to do anything, as yet”.

“We need time to get involved in these kind of programs”.

Good management is about making choices, so a decision not to do something should be analysed as closely as a decision to do something. In my experience, “cultural lock-in”- the phenomenon by which aerospace and defence industry professionals continue to do what they have always done, is the most significant obstacle in the journey towards a Lean Aerospace organization.

I was reading a recent 2009 Cincom report, this is an ERP company, which concluded that Lean manufacturing is lacking in the aerospace and defence industry.

Report Highlights

• Only 23% of aerospace and defence (A&D) manufacturers surveyed have implemented demand-driven manufacturing tactics such as electronic Kanban, lean manufacturing techniques and shared business processes.

• There is a lack of Lean project management with only 8% of those surveyed using integrated project management with lean manufacturing.

• Nearly 50% of aerospace and defence (A&D) manufacturers rely on redundant data input to manage their mixed-mode manufacturing processes. This means there is a limited amount of shared data between manufacturing modes. Other preferred processes included electronic Kanban/lean manufacturing (23%) and manual processes (8%), with the fewest respondents using an automated, integrated system.

• Slightly more than one-third of aerospace and defence (A&D) manufacturers surveyed (38%) have project-management integration with accounting, finance or customer-management systems. This means that nearly two-thirds (62%) have no project-management integration with these systems. This creates a gap between advanced manufacturers who can create profit and loss statements per project and those who lack insight into their projects’ profitability.

To conclude, Lean is not just a set of tools and techniques- it’s a mindset and an attitude- which requires top down leadership and visible support as matter of course. Until Aerospace executives realize this critical success factor for any Lean implementation, most corporate Lean initiatives will be limited to ad-hoc improvements  and fail to realize the benefits initially envisaged.

The following quote captures this point succinctly.

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof”.

~John Kenneth Galbraith

Kamran Zamir

Game-Change Consulting

2009-11-29

Jeremy Tranmer

Game-Change Consulting

I came across this article in the magazine, ONE; Airbus news for Airbus people, entitled “Strategic Futures”.

Airbus will continue to improve its existing aircraft families even as it looks to the horizon with its future aircraft programmes, says head of strategy Christian Scherer.

Airbus’ position as an innovator and market leader ensures its strategic direction attracts attention. The company’s reputation for delivering new standards is built upon the success of the A320 Family and extended with each new aircraft it delivers. But that success has not deterred others from entering the market. “Before 2020 we will have new competitors: a Chinese aircraft, a Russion aircraft, the Canadians, Brazilians, and Japanese,” Christian explained. “All of them are developing short- to medium-range aircraft what will come out in the middle of the next decade. We need to continue to improve the A320 Family to stay competitive. Without giving away too many details, Christian mentioned new advanced turbofan engines and the much-discussed wingtips as potential modifications that will increase the A320 Family’s range and maxumum take-off weight. “We are aspiring to a 5 per cent improvement in fuel burn with the wingtips alone and are pushing out technical and engineering communities to make these ready for entry into service during 2012,” he said. He added that unconventional open rotor engines are being considered for future generations of eco-efficient aircraft.

Beyond 2012, Christian emphasized that Airbus’ future programmes are driven by customers’ expectations and the maturity of available technologies. Economic efficiency, simplicity of operation and environmental friendliness are top priorities. “Customers’ number one criterion is fuel burn. That is crucial for the short- to medium-range market,” Christian said. Althought there is intense interest in a delivery time-frame, he believes that a successful end product is the first priority. “Frankly, the date is a detail. Our customers don’t just want an incremental improvement, they want a game changer. What’s important is that Airbus keeps its foot on the pedal of technical research. We want to remain leaders and innovators,” he added.

To that end, Airbus is making substantial research and development efforts in operations, propulsion, aerodynamics, and air traffic management. “We are moving beyond the traditional Airbus scope,” Christian pointed out. “Air traffic management is a huge subject that has an effect on the sustainability of our business frowth. Connectivity, providing air-ground connections, is another area we are promoting as part of our Vision 2020 drive to expand Airbus’ services business. We are also negotiating and implementing major international cooperation projects in support of Airbus’ globalisation strategy. There are a myriad of interesting products.”

Game-Change comment: While Airbus themselves recognise the threat of new entrants in the middle of the next decade, are they also on the ball when it comes to on-time, on-cost delivery of their technologically advanced designs? Recent history suggests not.

Does Airbus have effective operational design development systems aligned to Christian’s strategic directions. Again, recent history suggests its design/development processes are woefully inadequate. Indeed, a rumour circulating the industry is that Airbus has revoked the licences for the software it uses to develop and modify metal wings. Such software would be essential to develop any significant changes to all Airbus’ existing aircraft families. The rumour goes on to suggest that the reason is due to Power8 Plus, Airbus’ top-down improvement (read: short-term cost slashing) initiative. One can only marvel at the short-sightedness of such a decision, if it is true.

For an analysis of the threat posed by just the Japanese, see the Game-Change article: Is there a Future for the Western Commercial Aerospace Industry?

Jeremy Tranmer

Game-Change Consulting

Airbus Aims to Pull Back Without Stalling – WSJ.com:

This recent article about Airbus talks about facing a challenge of declining airplane orders.

Airbus said Friday that it booked orders for just 16 planes in March, compared with 54 orders in March 2008 and 37 orders the previous year. The company has said it may capture only between 300 and 400 new orders this year, down from 777 orders minus cancellations last year.

The article mentions some of the challenges:

• How to cut off orders without sticking suppliers with tons of inventory, which could bankrupt them?
• How to scale back on labor without having a “brain drain” when orders pick up again?

On the second question, I’ll give Airbus some credit for not treating production workers as a disposable, interchange direct unit labor cost:

And laying off skilled workers could cause a brain drain that slows an eventual recovery. “It takes a long time for us to train our folks who design and assemble planes, so we’ve got to be careful,” said Mr. Williams, Airbus’s executive vice president for programs, in an interview at the company’s headquarters here.

Hooray for being careful.

Now back to the first question on inventory… this comes back to a question of lead time. If you have long lead times (or wildly fluctuating customer orders), you need inventory as a buffer. A goal should be to reduce lead times (as the supplier) or level out production (as the customer) to help reduce total supply chain inventories. Or, the customer can partner with the supplier to work on reducing lead time through Lean improvements. My MIT masters thesis covers some of these relationships and makes the case that you can’t put the cart before the horse. You must reduce the root causes of holding inventory before just blindly cutting inventory.

As an aside, this is a concept that Dell never understood well when I was there. This is just one reason why I don’t consider Dell a true Toyota “Lean” company.

While they wanted “just-in-time” delivery of parts to factories, this was partly a ruse and an accounting trick. Large amounts of inventory were staged in supplier warehouses just off site and were delivered every two hours. That part of the equation was relatively easy – figure out what parts you need for the next two hours of production (taking planned orders and running that through the BOM to transmit needs to the warehouse).

One thing that made the Dell scenario complicated is that you often didn’t have ALL of the components required to build a given PC or given order. So the computer system had to run through and see what was “Available to Build” meaning all the parts were available. If an order was missing one part, you didn’t want to pull the other 20 parts needed for something that couldn’t be built.

And why was Dell often missing a key component?

1. Long lead times from suppliers
2. Wildly variable demand

Dell kept pushing suppliers to Asia (as part of the industry trend). Even mechanical items, like computer cases, were being made in Asia instead of down the road in Texas. As supply chain lead times get longer, you need more inventory. Dell was INCREASING total supply chain inventory, even though they still only had hours on hand on their own books. Or, you had more stockouts, which meant you couldn’t build all of your customer orders.

Dell also didn’t do much to practice “heijunka” or level loading of sales orders. For all of the typical reasons, Dell’s sales incentives drove a huge “hockey stick” effect where production and orders were huge in the last few weeks (and days) of any quarter, in order to hit quarterly production numbers. A friend of mine wrote a great MIT thesis about why Dell should take steps to level out sales, as the non-level production was getting increasingly expensive in many ways. But, I think this thesis was persona non grata with Dell and I suspect that’s why it’s not on the MIT website.

So back to Airbus… if they want to avoid sticking suppliers with inventory, they should have worked with them earlier to reduce lead times. Or, maybe they can use this slow period to work with them to prepare for the next ramp up (being able to respond with production, not just warehoused inventory) or prepare for the next slow down. Maybe they should all play the MIT Beer Game together as Mike from the Got Boondoggle? blog did with his company?

The airplane industry has learned to avoid big swings in production. Boeing has taken care to not increase production too quickly (but that leads to really long waiting times as the sales backlog increases). This article calls their backlog a “blessing in disguise” because their leveled production means there’s work (and jobs) today even with fewer orders. You can now get a plane in 2010 instead of having to wait until 2015.

Boeing’s experience shows that sudden shifts in production can be crippling. A decade ago, the plane maker tried to boost output in a short period and quickly faced shortages of parts and qualified staff. Dozens of unfinished jetliners sat outside factories under tents as workers scrambled to finish them. Resolving production problems pushed Boeing deep into losses even as it delivered a record number of planes. Since then, both Boeing and Airbus have tried to avoid big swings in production volumes.

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy. I don’t want to fly in a plane that was built under those circumstances. It’s one thing to build SUVs without brakes to rework them after a parking lot stint (as Ford did). It’s another thing to have poorly trained people off the street building a PC (as some companies might have done)… so that’s why Boeing has erred on the side of level production… focusing on quality and safety, I’ll give them that much, that they have learned. This article talks about the too-fast ramp-up for 737s and how that “yo-yo-ed” suppliers.

Airbus has been working with suppliers, this article says. I guess that’s Toyota-like, to partner and be at the supplier’s “gemba.” I’m not sure if having suppliers design and build 80% of the value-added content is Toyota-like….

Now, Mr. Williams said Airbus procurement staff are “walking the shop floor” at suppliers’ factories to spot signs of weakness, such as thin staff or insufficient inventories.

OK, so +1 point for Airbus.

But long lead times make it harder to forecast what you need. That was the case at Dell. As suppliers were further away, the lead times increased. It’s fundamental in operations that it’s harder to forecast out over a longer time horizon. This is true for Dell, Airbus, or Toyota. It’s like a law of physics.

“Of course we’d like to have more robust information, but it’s very difficult for Airbus themselves to have an accurate forecast,” Mr. Bolette said.

It was harder for Dell, because Dell was true “build to order” at that time. They had to order parts from suppliers based on forecasts. With Boeing, with their huge order backlog (waiting years to get a plane), if their suppliers are FAST enough, they should be able to order from suppliers based on TRUE volume, the way Dell orders parts from the off-site “it’s not ours” warehouse, right?

From the day Airbus decides to boost or cut output, its supply chain needs around a year to react through steps such as hiring staff, buying machine tools and sourcing raw materials. To shorten that period, Mr. Williams’ team has violated a key tenet of lean manufacturing — keeping parts inventories to a minimum — and squirreled away extra supplies of components that take particularly long to prepare, such as the metal forgings inside landing gear.

Again, a WSJ writer doesn’t understand Lean. This is quite a trend. “Low inventory” itself is NOT a “key tenet” of Lean (unless the 1980′s book “Zero Inventories” is the only book you’ve ever read about Lean and you only read the cover). That’s putting the cart before the horse.

The key tenet that Airbus (and other companies) might be violating is doing everything you can to reduce lead times. To reduce total supply chain inventory (-1 point to Dell). To first off, keep the line running (meet customer needs in a timely way, -1 point to Boeing) and then keep inventory as low as possible.

Airbus HAS to “squirrel away” parts precisely because of the long lead times. Either Airbus doesn’t get it, or the WSJ writer doesn’t get it. Could be most likely the latter, but you never know…

Source: eBlogger

Scott Deveau, Financial Post Published: Tuesday, October 13, 2009

To be honest with you, at this moment in time, when all is said and done, we should be thinking outside the box, by taking a helicopter view on this, so that in the fullness of time, we are all singing from the same hymn sheet, to make a paradigm shift, where we can put some wheels on it and see if it will fly, in order to enhance our company’s products and stay ahead of the game.

Eventually, after checking it out at the appropriate time, we should also fly a kite on this, by doing some ‘blue sky’ thinking to achieve the preliminary eyeball performance required on the Final Assembly Line (FAL), thereby giving us the micro gravitational situation, which we need to set up, to see what the RIO is on this business case.

Then we can raise the idea up the flag pole and see who salutes it, before we put it into production, only to realise that her bum looks too big in it!” Personally, I myself think, that at the end of the day, she will be over the moon with our decisions.

I came across this recent blog (can’t remember where), and found it most amusing.

Take care all!

Kamran Zamir

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“…Boeing had said at the Paris Air Show just days ago that the plane was ready to fly.”

I guess Boeing doesn’t have that type of culture? Or am I wrong?

source: leanblog.org

You have undoubtedly heard about the latest developments in the Boeing soap opera, most recently the announcement of a delay in the first flight of the 747-8.

In his FlightBlogger blog, Jon Ostrower has done a good job of analyzing what when wrong. He attributes it to “resource constraints driven by the engineering responsibilities diverted by the 787 program.”

He also quotes one engineer as saying that, with the 787 Dreamliner, “workers are adjusting to building a new airplane. A lot of them have been moved around…so their work lacks continuity which leads to production errors.”

What I find most interesting is Jon’s descriptions of problems stemming from early decisions about planning (or not planning).

Boeing decided against a full systems integration lab (SIL) for the 747-8 derivative aircraft, due to the influence of the legacy systems on the current design. However, because a SIL was unavailable, says a second 747-8 program engineer, many of the system level issues were encountered on the aircraft, rather than being caught in the lab.
In addition, without a universal computer model derived from Dassault Systemes CATIA v5 software, Boeing has found itself “trying to bridge the gap between 1969 and 2009,” says a veteran engineer based at one of Boeing’s 747-8 suppliers.

For example, the new wing design and enlarged empennage were designed through CATIA v5, while a portion of of the internal fuselage structure and other parts of the aircraft were built using legacy engineering drawings.
Some parts and their associated engineering drawings, the engineer says, have not changed since the 747-100, which in some instances has led to a loss of tolerance control in some areas.

All of this is very sad news about a company that knows as much about lean as Boeing. While following lean strategies and tactics might not, by itself, have been enough to avoid everything that has happened, certainly a greater attention to value stream mapping and management might have helped.

A lot of what Boeing learned over the years about lean seems to have been unlearned. Maybe when Alan Mulally is done at Ford he can return to Boeing.