Industry comments on the fastener problem and Boeing’s response
By Paul E. Teague -- Purchasing, 10/15/2007 1:18:00 PM
"Alcoa is working closely with Boeing, where Steve Schaffer and his team have built a new spirit of collaboration with its supply chain, to resolve the fastener issue," says a spokesperson for Alcoa.
“The rescheduling of the first flight was simply due to a slowing down in the supply chain rather than a fatal flaw in the supply chain.”—Jim McNerney, Boeing Chief Executive
“Actually, Boeing is to be commended for its efforts in managing the supply base. The company has overcome its supplier-management problems from a decade ago.” --Bill Lewandowski, vice president of supplier management at the Aerospace Industries Association in Arlington, Va.
“The fastener shortage is the tip of the iceberg and the aerospace industry will be seeing more material shortages for several reasons.—Bill Lewandowski, vice president of supplier management at the Aerospace Industries Association
“The latest delay isn’t significant since this is a brand new type of aircraft requiring almost continuous design changes that are requiring changes in tooling and fabrication of some key parts. The Boeing 787 is a whole new kind of plane using a whole bunch of new parts. It represents the beginning of a radically new design paradigm for commercial aircraft using dramatically increased amounts of structural titanium and carbon fiber. While it may be that the fastener maker hasn’t gotten its act together yet, that may be a problem thrust upon it by design and not purchasing at Boeing.”—Mark Parr, managing director at KeyBanc Capital Markets, Cleveland.
“For perspective, we point out that in the larger scheme of a 30-year aircraft program, a six-month delay is marginal at best.”—Merrill Lynch report.
“We think the issues we are seeing are tied to rework issues on the first airplane, not to fundamental issues in the production system.”—Scott Carson, president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes.
“Boeing has been pretty forthcoming about problems with the 787 program, although we previously heard of more than has been let on.”—Leeham Company report.
"As we've experienced in the last couple of months, we are not experiencing things we didn't think we would experience. We're just experiencing slower resolution of what we thought we would find, which, are supply-chain related issues, which for me doesn't in any way invalidate the approach. It's more an issue of getting the supply chain up and going. I am not seeing anything that says that supplier partner #1 or #2 or #3 can't get to the status that they've committed to, nor have I seen, in Everett, a capability that isn't there to put the plane together. It's more that the work shifted, parts unavailability, and so we are wrestling with scarce, out-of-sequence work that we expected to have. It's just taking us longer to get it done. It's sort of starting up the supply chain rather than a fatal flaw in the supply chain." --Jim McNerney, Boeing CEO
"Would we change the [supplier] strategy, based on this experience? The answer is no from my perspective. I think this is more of a starting up a completely new production system for us. We are not doing it as well as we want to, but I think I am convinced that as we work our way through it, that we're going to be glad when we get to the other side of the start-up in that all of the things that recommended this approach to us to begin with, in terms of the benefits of broader, deeper engineering capability, global stance, etc. leveraging technology tools, IT tools we haven't been able to use before, the financial model I think are things that will still attract us to this way of doing things." -Jim McNerney, Boeing CEO
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