Sanford I. Weill
Something I’ve been hearing a lot about lately from the Aerospace & Defense industry is the problem of missing parts. It’s not that fuselages or rocket engines are disappearing. Rather, simple but essential parts aren’t getting produced properly or at all. What happens is that the project stalls as a given manufacturer or assembler waits. And waits.
We might think in such a critical and regulated industry as A&D, that having parts go missing would be a rare event. Apparently not. I’ve heard from several people in the industry that it happens more than they would like to admit.
The problem can be as simple as the bolts for one part of the engine that were specified and available in the original design, but got changed in one of the ECOs and nobody bothered to tell the vendor’s supplier. Or the supplier was told but forgot to act on the memo.
Complexity in the A&D Manufacturing Process
Why has this mis-communication become a growing problem? I’m sure it has a lot to do with the complexity of the modern production / supply chain, especially in the A&D industry. Nobody makes an airplane or a rocket in one place, or even within one country.
As an example of the complexity at work, according to Boeing on their website, “the 787 Dreamliner has about 2.3 million parts per airplane. They include everything from ‘fasten seatbelt’ signs to jet engines and vary in size from small fasteners to large fuselage sections.”
Continuous Improvement Compounds Complexity
Making matters worse, manufacturers continue to seek ways to improve operational excellence. So, processes are constantly being evaluated and potentially improving, adding new challenges. What this means is that the tracking and enforcing Engineering Change Orders (ECOs) through every step of manufacturing and assembly, for every single item affected by ECOs, can no longer be done satisfactorily with manual or disparate systems. It is for this reason that digital manufacturing solutions are increasingly being deployed within the A&D industry. By connecting engineering design with execution systems, it is possible to address and overcome the challenge of managing ECOs – and ensuring current designs are being executed upon during production activities.
If you forget to update one item or fail to call one supplier about the smallest component change, then the entire production process might grind to a halt. For multi-million dollar products, that kind of downtime can be quite costly, and apparently increasingly unavoidable.
Digital Manufacturing as a Good Approach
This increasing complexity is why Boeing, for one, has been digitizing their engineering and production processes for quite some time now. The company requires suppliers and their partners to work with their digital manufacturing and engineering systems to perform change orders. The system is dynamic and fully integrated, so ECOs ripple automatically to the furthest reaches of the supply chain. This way, Boeing can update products as often as necessary and not worry about whether every partner on the list has heard the news.
Not only do details “create” the big picture, but they can “destroy” it too, if some are missing when you are manufacturing or assembling an aircraft. Change will always happen, and the more complex the supply chain, the more important it is to have automated methods of processing ECOs and deploying them everywhere.
Many companies think they have control because they’re on top of the big issues. But the fact is, every supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link, whether that link is a common bolt … or just a nail.
Here are two other blog posts focused on the aerospace & defense industry that you might find interesting:
- The OEM Handoff – Shifting Design Responsibility puts Greater Burden on Aerospace Suppliers
- Apply a Profit Imperative to Traceability Regulations
