FAA delay doesn’t deter Eclipse
-- Purchasing, 1/12/2006
Late in December, Eclipse Aviation announced that FAA certification of its Eclipse 500, which was originally scheduled for March 2006, would move to late in the second quarter. The schedule change, the company said in a news release, was driven by supplier delays, including a slip in one major supplier’s delivery program.
Purchasing Magazine spoke with Bill Bonder, vice president of supply chain management at Eclipse Aviation, about the change while he was traveling in Japan last week. "We’ve always been open with customers," he says. "Through our Website they could see that we were missing some milestones [set to measure the company’s progress towards its goal of manufacturing very light jets]. We prefer not to have any slips from a customer satisfaction perspective. Once we had a strong idea that we would not hit the March date we were upfront about it." He explains that as Eclipse was getting closer to some of the target dates it had set, it was getting a better feel for some remaining milestones and soon realized that there was going to be risk going forward. "We re-baselined the issues and came up with a new schedule we have high confidence in," says Bonder. Management had high confidence in the earlier dates as well. "But obviously the further back you are, there’s more to balance and work through," Bonder says. "It doesn’t take much in such a complex program to cause a delay like this. It was something we would have liked to have avoided. Now that we are getting closer to the new date, we have a good feel for everything in front of us and what needs to happen."
To that end, Eclipse now feels its plan is highly executable and achievable. The plan, which extends out to the company’s supply base, consists of preparing for certification documents, testing, and production readiness. "We feel we have a fully integrated and realistic plan with the right resources and right team in place with the right focus from the supply base," Bonder says. "At this point, it comes down to executing to the plan."
Still, there’s risk going forward. "What we need to do is tightly manage the plan," says Bonder. "If the unexpected occurs, then we need to quickly address and mitigate the issue. Over the next couple of quarters, our focus is to manage the plan and take care of any unknowns. Our team within Eclipse works extremely well with our supply base in a very collaborative manner."
As Eclipse readies for production ramp up, Bonder and the team are communicating frequently with key suppliers. If they are not visiting supplier sites, they are speaking on the phone with suppliers weekly. "We have very tight communication with our entire supply base," he says. "As soon as we knew that we were doing a reschedule we contacted our suppliers to update them on details of our new plan. Tight collaborative planning and communication pays off at a time like this."
Cross functional teams consisting of representatives from supply chain, operations, program management and engineering regularly conduct supplier program management reviews (SPRMs). "We are re-baselining all the actions to make sure the plan has a strong line of sight to hitting our new objectives," says Bonder.Click here to read Purchasing's feature story "High expectations" showing how Eclipse Aviation's procurement uses strategic sourcing and aggressive cost control to help drive innovation.
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