Buyers at Boeing Commercial Airplanes are flying high because of the new challenges and opportunities presented by the new 787 Dreamliner. In essence, they're working with engineering to dramatically expand the use of carbon-fiber composites—and to help develop the best fabricators of that material.

Boeing is the nation's largest consumer of heat-treated aluminum and aerospace-grade titanium, developing over the past decade a sophisticated production purchasing organization at its assembly center in Everett, Wash. The metals buyers within the Global Partners supply organization also buy miles of other raw materials to support five active passenger and freighter jetliner production programs.

But the use of the light-weight composites—a potential game changer in an industry saddled with high fuel costs—is changing the procurement organization's focus, increasing buyer interactions with engineering and restructuring the supply chain. The buying team and its parts suppliers are getting their composite material from a single source, the Toray Industries plant in nearby Tacoma.

Since the commercial airplane group outsources the development and manufacturer of nearly all the aircraft's systems to suppliers, the 787 Dreamliner is a milestone for global development, procurement and manufacturing. Working together, the design and procurement team have employed such supply management techniques as:

• Early supplier involvement in the aircraft's design.
• Advanced sourcing practices for key raw materials.
• And outsourcing of entire systems to suppliers.

Buying composite material—actually high-strength carbon fiber preimpregnated with toughened epoxy resin—"created some real technology and engineering challenges that needed to be solved for us to have the confidence to make a whole fuselage and a whole wing structure out of carbon fiber," Byrne tells Purchasing. "Engineering-wise, the fuselage and the wing going to composite was a big leap. Then, there were the design and procurement team changes that were necessitated from sourcing predominantly aluminum and titanium to buying key components from carbon fiber."

787 Dreamliner fuselage is made up of large composite parts with a high degree of contour that will be assembled without the dimples and rivets common to jetliner exteriors.

Boeing's supply management approach always is to work collaboratively with suppliers to identify and secure new innovative composite materials that are stronger and lighter than conventional materials. However, so far, the only 787-qualified composite supplier is Toray. "So, we play an instrumental role in coordinating and aggregating demand so capacity development by Toray meets demand needs of the program and we also work to find the best business arrangements of all involved," says Byrne. "Technically, our partners will negotiate their own contracts with Toray; we act as an integrator." That's because composites tends to be specification specific—either to a certain, often single, use or to a single producer.

Carbon fiber-based composites can be considered the biggest buy of the 787 project. That's because 50% of the structure is composite material, about 20% is aluminum, 15% is titanium and the rest is titanium, copper wiring and other materials. By comparison, the 777 is 80% aluminum, titanium and other metals with 10% composite material and 10% other materials. "The fuselage is the main component of the 787," says Byrne. "But we had the design and purchasing knowledge and confidence built off the 777 that allowed us to expand its use in the '87."

Fabrication of composite parts for the 787 vertical tail fin is done at the Boeing’s Composite Manufacturing Center in Frederickson, Wash., which also fabricates the 777 model’s empennage.

"All the airplanes we're building and delivering right now have an aluminum structure, for example," Byrne says. And the purchasing systems are well established. "Aluminum and the other metals are more mature, known materials entities," he says. "The applicable aerospace alloys tend not to be proprietary and tend to be available in the general marketplace. So, there are multiple people who can make it to our specifications and deliver it as needed."

Actually, that's a good thing, since "we still have a tremendous number of aluminum airplanes being bought—with 887 ordered in 2006 alone—that also require large amounts of titanium," says Jeff Hanley, senior manager for metallic materials. Total aluminum use is growing, not declining. What's happening is that aluminum "is changing its content from the big skins that make up the fuselage and the big structural pieces—skins and, what we call spars—that make up the wings," Hanley says. "But if you look at the 787, there still is a pretty big chunk of weight in the airplane that still is aluminum, almost 20%."

From a purchasing standpoint, Boeing has more options available to buyers for the traditional metals. The Global Partners organization has long-term contracts with a select number of mills and a single key distributor who handle most of the required volume for the aerospace metal by Boeing's fabrication centers and its top-tier suppliers.

During reorganizations this decade, the procurement organization at Boeing Commercial Airplanes has looked to suppliers worldwide for innovative new materials and sub-systems. If anything, the purchasing team for the 787 has expanded the collaborative approach with suppliers so they act as the master orchestrator, coordinating these disparate and geographically dispersed partners and managing final assembly and quality management.

"As we develop and introduce the 787, we are changing the baseline for structural parts on the airplane to composite material," Byrne explains. And even though there has been some use of composites in the empennage, the tail structure, of the Boeing 777 jetliner, sourcing of this material for large-scale production—and adjusting the metals buy for different future parts—has required adjustments in the supply chain and manufacturing.

Hanley notes that since the purchasing organization knew enough about the suppliers who had been qualified to fabricate composites for the 777 program, "we invited them to join development very early." That's because while the buying and design team and these fabricators "knew about composite materials for use in the tail, the applications for the 787 were so different that manufacturing techniques for structural parts would be significantly different."