Paper Airplanes

100 years ago the Wright Brothers made their flights at Kitty Hawk. They knew they weren't the first to fly and their goal was not flying but controlled flight. They succeeded, got patents and spent much of their later years litigating their concepts. Control concepts remain at the heart of most ventures as this story about airplane manufacturing illustrates.

PAPER AIRPLANES (or ignoring a billion dollar wake-up call)

During 1997, Boeing lost about a billion dollars. More humiliating was that they had lost control of manufacturing. 747 production was shut down for a month and they had to lure 737 assembly line workers out of retirement.

Boeing’s primary failure was inbreeding of manufacturing concepts. They were still building planes the same way they always had. Shop floor documents and change orders were probably heavier than the planes. They had great numbers and drawings but like the "Tinman" of Oz a heartbeat was lacking.

Lots of bright people running great computer systems isn’t enough. You need managers who understand that systems don’t run the factory – they support manufacturing.

I wrote the above in 1998, astonished that Boeing didn't have their factory "act" together, thinking that that it was a "tactical" problem and management, seeing its cost, would rapidly remedy it. Instead it was a strategic management failure of a sleeping giant with disastrous implications.

The current situation is detailed in a recent "SLATE" article. The writer observed the same chaos as I did but reports why and how management continued to allow the company to self-destruct. Here is a link: http://slate.msn.com/id/2092031/ and a brief excerpt follows:

"What explains Boeing's fate? In a word: greed. Or rather, two words: greed and hubris. Boeing was in many ways a perfectly successful company in the mid-1990s, dominant in commercial aviation with a thriving sideline in military and space contracts. But the company had also become arrogant and lethargic, unwilling to update production-line techniques that had barely changed since B-29s were built on the same Lake Washington site where 737 and 757 aircraft are made today. And Boeing was not about to acknowledge that upstart Airbus, the European-based jetliner maker, posed any real threat."

Is Boeing an ostrich farm? What about your company ? Check-out the other articles on our web site for more information on effective manufacturing tactics and strategies that create a path to future profitability. (Link to our index of Archived articles on manufacturing methods and systems ).

We can help: not only in the tactical decisions of day to day production but in analyzing strategic issues that redefine methods, layout and capacity. Future product mixes and volumes, environmental issues, labor availability, etc. may obsolete present product lines and/or processes. Delivering today’s orders on-time, within budget and without rejects is nice but what are you going to do the day after tomorrow?