Case Study: Boeing Supply Chain Challenges during the Manufacture of Boeing 787 Aircraft


Book Description

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Business economics - Supply, Production, Logistics, grade: A, The University of Liverpool, language: English, abstract: Founded in 1916, at the Puget Sound location in Washington State USA, Boeing is the largest aircraft company in the world, manufacturing commercial aircrafts, military aircrafts, satellites, weapons and electronic defence systems. It has a history of being the best aircraft company in leadership and innovation to design leading aircraft designs. The company uses advanced technology, engineering skills and innovative leadership to design and develop its products. As a result, it is the best in the USA and worldwide, serving many other nations with commercial and military aircraft. To remain innovative and competitive, in 1990s Boeing started considering a replacement of the Boeing 767, due to slow rate of sales. By 16th December 2003, Boeing announce that it was going to assemble the 787 jet in its factory located at Everett Washington . In building this plane, the company focused on reducing the time line from 6 years to 4 years. Instead of contracting the plane from scratch, it was going to outsource parts and issue sub-contracts to other companies in other nations. The process of production requires raw materials and labor, which take time to procure and manage for the companies to come up with the right products. For the Boeing company to produce the 787 parts in the USA, it would have incurred high costs in procurements and a lot of management logistics. To cut down these costs, outsourcing was a nice way out that provided the company with the ability to enjoy the availability of skilled labor and raw materials in the outsourcing companies.




Managing Supply Chain Risk


Book Description

“Supply Chain Risk Management is an issue that many companies face and yet few companies know how to deal with it in a systematic and pragmatic manner. While avoiding and reducing supply chain risks are certainly preferable, developing ways to restore and stabilize supply chain operations rapidly after a major disruption is critical for managing global supply chains. Sodhi and Tang present important concepts, frameworks, strategies, and analyses that are essential for managing supply chain risks. Not only does this book suggest some practical ways to work with different partners to manage the risks that are present in a global supply chain, it creates a framework that would enable practitioners to engage researchers to work on this important area.” —Thomas A. Debrowski, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Operations, Mattel, Inc. “When a firm outsources its operations to external suppliers, the firm is vulnerable to major and rare disruptions that can occur at any link in the global supply chain. Because these disruptions rarely occur, few firms take commensurable actions to identify, assess, mitigate and respond to various types of supply chain risks. By introducing frameworks and concepts along with several case studies and a review of academic literature, Sodhi and Tang treat this important subject with practical relevance and academic rigor. This book will bring practitioners and researchers to develop effective and efficient ways to manage supply chain risks.” —Marshall L. Fisher, UPS Professor, Professor of Operations and Information Management and Co-Director of Fishman-Davidson Center for Service and Operations Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania “This book ties observations in practice to methodologies and research. The rich case examples motivated the approaches and methodologies used to mitigate risks, and in the course of doing so, Sodhi and Tang provided insights on existing and new research opportunities. As a result, this book is highly relevant to both practitioners and academics. Also, the book is also written with management lessons on how risks can be mitigated, and how risks can be contained once disruptions have occurred. As such, it is also a book for management to gain insights and to develop management skills.” —Hau L. Lee, Thoma Professor of Operations, Information and Technology and Director of the Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University “As companies have extended their supply chains globally and as the face increasing resource issues, they face a number of new risk challenges. While there are various case studies written about supply chain risks, this book gives a comprehensive treatment of the subject with clarity. The concepts and frameworks developed by Sodhi and Tang in this book would create awareness of this important and yet not well understood subject, and strategies described in this book would stimulate practitioners to develop a holistic approach for identifying, assessing, mitigating, and responding to different types of supply chain risks.” —Nick Wildgoose, Global Supply Chain Proposition Manager, Zurich Insurance​




Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability


Book Description

Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability, a book that both practitioners and students can use to better understand and manage supply chain risk, presents topics on decision making related to supply chain risk. Leading academic researchers, as well as practitioners, have contributed chapters focusing on developing an overall understanding of risk and its relationship to supply chain performance; investigating the relationship between response time and disruption impact; assessing and prioritizing risks; and assessing supply chain resilience. Supply chain managers will find Managing Supply Chain Risk and Vulnerability a useful tool box for methods they can employ to better mitigate and manage supply chain risk. On the academic side, the book can be used to teach senior undergraduate students, as well as graduate-level students. Additionally, researchers may use the text as a reference in the area of supply chain risk and vulnerability.




Flying Blind


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BUSINESS BEST SELLER • A suspenseful behind-the-scenes look at the dysfunction that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation: the 2018 and 2019 crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX. An "authoritative, gripping and finely detailed narrative that charts the decline of one of the great American companies" (New York Times Book Review), from the award-winning reporter for Bloomberg. Boeing is a century-old titan of industry. It played a major role in the early days of commercial flight, World War II bombing missions, and moon landings. The planemaker remains a cornerstone of the U.S. economy, as well as a linchpin in the awesome routine of modern air travel. But in 2018 and 2019, two crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 killed 346 people. The crashes exposed a shocking pattern of malfeasance, leading to the biggest crisis in the company’s history—and one of the costliest corporate scandals ever. How did things go so horribly wrong at Boeing? Flying Blind is the definitive exposé of the disasters that transfixed the world. Drawing from exclusive interviews with current and former employees of Boeing and the FAA; industry executives and analysts; and family members of the victims, it reveals how a broken corporate culture paved the way for catastrophe. It shows how in the race to beat the competition and reward top executives, Boeing skimped on testing, pressured employees to meet unrealistic deadlines, and convinced regulators to put planes into service without properly equipping them or their pilots for flight. It examines how the company, once a treasured American innovator, became obsessed with the bottom line, putting shareholders over customers, employees, and communities. By Bloomberg investigative journalist Peter Robison, who covered Boeing as a beat reporter during the company’s fateful merger with McDonnell Douglas in the late ‘90s, this is the story of a business gone wildly off course. At once riveting and disturbing, it shows how an iconic company fell prey to a win-at-all-costs mentality, threatening an industry and endangering countless lives.




Boeing


Book Description

Boeing originally was scheduled to deliver the Dreamliner to airline customers in mid-2008. However, after five announced delays over two years, the company was forced to postpone the first test flight. One driver for the delay was an industry-wide shortage of aerospace fasteners, the hardware that held the aircraft together. Engineers at Boeing never could have imagined that fasteners, which comprise approximately 3% of the total cost of an aircraft, would become such an issue.




Aviation Systems


Book Description

This book aims to provide comprehensive coverage of the field of air transportation, giving attention to all major aspects, such as aviation regulation, economics, management and strategy. The book approaches aviation as an interrelated economic system and in so doing presents the “big picture” of aviation in the market economy. It explains the linkages between domains such as politics, society, technology, economy, ecology, regulation and how these influence each other. Examples of airports and airlines, and case studies in each chapter support the application-oriented approach. Students and researchers in business administration with a focus on the aviation industry, as well as professionals in the industry looking to refresh or broaden their knowledge of the field will benefit from this book.




Designing and Controlling the Outsourced Supply Chain


Book Description

All organizations outsource. They differ only in the scope and extent of what they procure as goods and services from outside entities. These choices drive an organization's financial performance and long-term competitive viability, and establish the tenor of day-to-day operations. Outsourcing can solve many problems, but is also fraught with hidden costs and risks. This monograph examines outsourcing from a lifecycle perspective. This means tracing the full arc from the germination of the idea to outsource, to the assessment of options, to the installation of control mechanisms, to grappling with conflicts that inevitably arise over time, all the way to the sunset of the chosen strategy. The analysis is highly attentive to the details of operational execution, especially regarding how human resources participate in these decision processes and are impacted by the choices made.




Managing Supply Chain Disruptions


Book Description

Managing Supply Chain Disruptions categorizes and review the substantive research contributions relating to managing supply chain disruptions. With a primary emphasis on formulating directions for future research, the authors focus on significant research and practical findings. Managing Supply Chain Disruptions reviews the general area of supply chain disruptions and examine classifications of disruptions which can be used to provide insights into the disruption management process. It reviews the literature in the emerging field of disruption risk management which attempts to identify specific risks associated with supply chain disruptions. This is followed by a review of conceptual/empirical research with a focus on providing general insights into how one or more organizations have managed the risk associated with disruptions. Given that designing robust supply chain networks are a key feature of managing disruption risk, the authors examine the relevant research in this domain. A detailed analysis of prior research targeted at managing specific risks (e.g., product, supply, operations/process, and transportation risks) is presented, and finally, directions for future research are discussed.




Supply Chain Management and Advanced Planning


Book Description

"... To sum up, there should be a copy on the bookshelf of all engineers responsible for detailed planning of the Product Delivery Process (PDP). The Editors highlight the impressive gains reported by companies exploiting the potential of coordinating organizational units and integrating information flows and planning efforts along a supply chain. This publication is strong on coordination and planning. It is therefore recommended as an up-to-date source book for these particular aspects of SCM." International Journal of Production Research 2001/Vol. 39/13




The Age of Agile


Book Description

An unstoppable business revolution is under way, and it is Agile. Sparking dramatic improvements in quality, innovation, and speed-to-market, the Agile movement has helped companies learn to connect everyone and everything…all the time. With rapidly evolving consumer needs and technology that is being updated quicker than ever before, businesses are recognizing how essential it is to adapt quickly. The Agile movement enables a team, unit, or enterprise to nimbly acclimate and upgrade products and services to meet these constantly changing needs. Filled with examples from every sector, The Age of Agile helps you: Master the three laws of Agile Management (team, customer, network) Embrace the new mindset Overcome constraints Employ meaningful metrics Make the entire organization Agile Companies don’t need to be born Agile. With the groundbreaking formulas laid out in The Age of Agile, even global giants can learn to act entrepreneurially. Your company’s future may depend on it!