Boeing has been building commercial airliners since 1927 with the first Boeing commercial jet airliner, the 7O7, introduced in l955. As discussed in the article on page 172 of the text. This success is even more remarkable when one realizes that the Boeing “Design/ Build” process had not changed very much during the past three decades. The system was antiquated, cumbersome, and inefficient creating production delays, increased costs, and spawning a huge bureaucracy simply to handle the paperwork. Boeing must clearly be motivated to bring this World War II era process into the 21st Century.
Airbus Industries’ increasingly larger share of the commercial airliner market was a major force instigating these changes. Airbus had the advantages of government subsidies to help defray the costs of implementing best design practices, as well as latecomer advantages. It learned from Boeing’s, as well as Lockheed’s and McDonnell Douglas’, mistakes and it did not have 40 years of bureaucratic momentum to overcome. Other motivating factors include the need for Boeing to increase the income from the commercial aircraft division to offset the loss of revenue due to cutbacks in government defense and aerospace contracts.
In this paper I will attempt to highlight those topics I think should be covered, suggestions, and background for those reasons. In this I will hope to show why the Boeing Company was in need of the much-needed overhaul of the design/build process at Boeing, the changes themselves as well as the methodology used in accomplishing those changes.
The last decade has seen the commercial aircraft industry dominated by two manufacturers: the Boeing Commercial Aircraft Company and Airbus Industries, with McDonnell Douglas, a distant third. Airbus Industries is a relative newcomer, but it has very quickly provided much competition to Boeing, surpassing McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed. Airbus Industries is a consortium backed by the British, French, German and Spanish governments. The great, and many say unfair, advantage that Airbus has over the competition is government subsidies allowing Airbus to operate in the red. Thus, Airbus can afford to develop new technologies without having to worry about passing on the costs to the customers and can price their aircraft very competitively to lure away airlines from Boeing.
The effects of the changing airline industry resulting from deregulation in 1978 are still being felt in the commercial aircraft industry. The competition among airlines for passengers has resulted in a greater emphasis on cost cutting leading to mergers and bankruptcies. In addition, airlines modified their routing systems since they were not limited to certain routes, as was the case before deregulation, changing their buying patterns for aircraft accordingly. Airlines were now less concerned with having a technologically superior airplane and more concerned about the cost and efficiency of that airplane.
The first question that comes to mind is “why would the undisputed leader in the commercial airliner industry make such a risky, change?”. In other words, doesn’t the old motto “If it ain’t broke, Don’t fix it” apply in this case? Well according to many observers both inside and outside of Boeing, the system was ‘broke’. To give an example of the inefficiency of the process that coordinates engineering and manufacturing, it used to take 800 different computer systems to manage it. This process has been around since Boeing was building the B-17 Bomber in World War II. The process of tracking parts in an airplane was called “effectinitly” and was done manually! A drafter required two years of training to fully understand the system, and still one-third of the paper work contained errors. This “effectivity” just doesn’t make sense, and this process adds absolutely no value to their product and results in tremendous costs.
Regardless of all the evidence pointing to flaws in the system, changing a successful company is not easy, especially if we consider the cost and the additional time involved. For the 777, the additional time is estimated to be six months over the normal 48 months to develop a new airplane. Getting a tremendously large bureaucratic system to move forward is a daunting task, especially while continuing to produce airplanes.
The changes to the Boeing Commercial Aircraft Company must encompass all fields. From the philosophy of the company to the technical details, every aspect of the design/build process will need to be modified.
All content is integrated and organized to fit each user’s needs and delivery preferences.
- Lack of collection point for distributed server statistics
- Split between internal metrics and vendor hosted metrics
- Lack of direct user identification
- Difficulty of collecting true costs and true benefits
- Lack of accounting tools to measure intangibles
- Collecting metrics from high volume servers as indicators of growth
- Using local server statistics to monitor content usage
- Using traditional survey methods to answer questions about usefulness, abuse, and value
- Collecting data on increased revenue, decreased costs, and better use of information for specific sites
- Participating in bench marking surveys with peer institutions
All content being able to be integrated and organized to fit each user’s needs and delivery preferences.
- Rapid proliferation of tools for content delivery
- Media hype based on marketing claims
- Lack of software compatibility
- Instability of tools developed on fast schedules
- Lack of common standards for content description
- Poor integration of delivery tools and content
- Providing enterprise-wide delivery systems for search and filtering
- Site licensing search products for local server use
- Providing product support for licensed products
- Encouraging internal information owners to develop processes to manage their information, and making visible those sites that succeed
- Encouraging vendors to separate content from delivery tools, and to work towards common content formats
Ensure all content is integrated and organized to fit each user’s needs and delivery preferences.
- Wide accessibility brings enterprise-wide deficiencies into visibility
- Platform incompatibilities are escalating, driving importance of common standards
- Those standards are still in evolution, and often pushed for competitive advantage
- Problems of scale become major roadblocks for needed infrastructure services (directory, authentication)
- Pull between distributed and centralized services is a constant struggle
All content is integrated and organized to accommodate each user’s needs and delivery preferences.
- Most difficult piece of the puzzle to solve, and least interesting to technologists
- Rich content is essential for better management
- Agreement on how to enrich that content is not easy
- Very few standards for content description are available or stable
- Commercial tools do not lend themselves to software- independent content description
- 90% of the battle is education
- Adopting a subset of Dublin Core meta-data as the company-wide tagging standard
- Initiating groups to examine impact of XML and RDF on Boeing’s existing and planned content sets
- Promoting and presenting pilot projects using rich content through cross-company forums
- Influencing internal standards boards to address issues of content management vs. infrastructure management
- Participating in research studies and other activities related to knowledge management
All content is integrated and organized to fit each user’s needs and delivery preferences.
- Users all have different needs
- Identifying those needs is difficult
- Meeting those needs is harder still
- User expectations are often unrealistic
- Content is often tied to delivery systems
- Content is protected by passwords
- Tracking usage statistics to find high impact pages
- Using surveys to collect feedback
- Performing usability studies on high profile web sites
- Studying specific user groups’ information seeking behavior
- Looking at cultural barriers to effective use of information
- Lobbying vendors to adopt common content and retrieval standards
- Purchasing content separately from delivery systems wherever possible
All employees must be part of a team and have the pride that accompanies it.
- Working as teams can at times be extremely difficult
- Knowing your employees and your supervisors can cause animosity among sections
- Trust with in the company must be earned
- Boeing is touting the 777 as a new processes not just a new product, a philosophy that is espoused by everyone from the top down.
- Cards worn on name tags were printed listing the mission, goals, objectives
- The Boeing company mission statement is: “To be the number one aerospace company in the world and among the premier industrial concerns in terms of quality, profitability and growth.” On the backside of the 777 division cards was this mission statement: “Working together to produce the preferred new airplane family.”
