The IAM union strike against the Boeing Company ended a week ago Monday, just in time for the U.S. elections on Tuesday. There has been much angst about the strike and also the elections here in the U.S., and for some of the same reasons. It has been an emotional roller coaster for many and people feel that things haven’t always worked out the way they planned on or expected. While I won’t get into current politics, I will comment on what one of my friends said over 30 years ago when I told him I had accepted a job at the Boeing Company. He was a trusted advisor, a CFO at a prominent Computer Networking company. I valued his opinion and looked up to him as a successful human being and my mentor. He asked me how many employees there were at Boeing at the time. I said around 100,000. His comment then surprised me. He said, “What a management snake pit!” I was fresh out of graduate school at the time, and I didn’t know quite what to think of it. I still remember to this day that he was spot on – I just didn’t know what I was getting into at the time, being a lowly systems engineer with aspirations of climbing the ladder, but no idea what the future path would hold. I learned a lot at Boeing during the six years I worked there in the 1990s. It was a great education on business, people and especially process (how things really get done in a large corporation). I did do some real work from time to time, but as a low man on the totem pole it wasn’t usually that fulfilling (some could have been ‘make work’ or non-essential tasks, just to keep busy, and keep our budgets intact for the next year). Yes, it was a snake pit, and you had to be on the lookout for ways to CYA (I didn’t do so well at that game). The next four years in our country may require agile thinking for manufacturers on this subject.
So, What About Today’s Boeing?
Many folks are talking about Boeing now that the strike is over. It is time to recapture the essence of Boeing and get back to work earning the confidence of the employees, airline customers and the flying public (eventual customers). Boeing is unique in many aspects. They’re still one of the largest manufacturers in the U.S. They have a huge supply base or worldwide supply chain by outsourcing over 80% of the parts used on their airplanes. Their primary supplier Spirit Aerosystems – which used to be the Boeing Wichita division - was recently acquired (after it had been spun out of Boeing nearly 20 years ago based on the decision of a prior CEO). Boeing has gone full circle with this decision it seems in the space of about 20 years. Outsourcing – Insourcing – Off/On shoring, all need the same things. The quality of construction and parts must be at the highest levels, or people suffer terrible consequences. If you are to outsource anything you need to have someone at least as smart on staff to watch over the outsourcing folks to make sure you get quality results. At Boeing there are several cases or mishaps which haven’t had the best results. Most notably earlier this year a door separated from the fuselage of a 737 mid-flight and although no one was seriously injured, it could have been much worse, and the fallout of this accident has cost Boeing dearly in reputation. Once this incident happened, the blame game started. It was originally a finger-pointing match between Boeing and its supplier Spirit Aero, but in the end they’re both at fault. It hasn’t always been perfect at Boeing, but they’ve been cognizant of the risks of their products for years.
For context, I was in a large meeting with about 30+ employees on October 4, 1992, when I worked at Boeing. We were meeting with senior engineering leaders about how we should invest in new systems for design and manufacturing data management. Since these new proposed systems would impact both engineering, operations, quality, and information technology departments, we had assembled the heads of all groups dealing with these disciplines in a large conference room in Everett, WA.
We waited for the head of engineering for the Boeing 747 to attend. It was his conference room, but he wasn’t available even though he had accepted the appointment to attend. After about 30 minutes of small talk with the other department heads, the SVP of Engineering finally came in… very agitated. He read everyone the ‘riot act’ before we could say anything about our proposal. We had several VPs and Directors in the meeting as it was a cross-functional team with many participants. He mentioned how inefficient it was to have that many people in a ‘team’ or conference room. We understood clearly that he wasn’t interested in our subject that day because he had been on the phone since early in the morning with his team in Amsterdam – a Boeing 747 El AL Cargo plane had gone down and 48 people lost their lives in this disaster. That was sobering news (we hadn’t heard of this before the meeting). We left the conference room quietly, but only after the head of engineering said: “Why do we need so many people in the room to make a decision?” He said in effect: “We’re taking too long to decide things, meanwhile our competitors are eating our lunch.” It was probably a lot spicier than this, but that’s the message I got out of that meeting that day. We didn’t decide anything then, but over the next few months we decided as a company to launch a huge re-engineering project to address these data management challenges.
I was selected to participate in this new elite team of around 30 engineers. Then within a few months it grew to an “elite” 300 employees, then an elite division of around 1,300 people. That’s when I realized that it would be hard for me to make an impact or help steer the ship, and I started to look at ways we could salvage the business process re-engineering process.
First Things First: Understand Your As-Is Process
One of the best things you can do for any re-engineering process is to figure out how things really get accomplished in your manufacturing business. I used to tell people to ‘think of Boeing as a gigantic vending machine.’ At one end of the black box, the customer puts in $150 million dollars and out the other end pops a 747, about 18 to 48 months later. I think costs have gone way up since then and the timeline as well. The key is to think holistically about it and all the ways to cut down the costs as well as the timeline without sacrificing quality.
So with the ‘new’ Boeing, how do they accomplish their tasks of building airplanes? In short, the products are very complex and it is hard to visualize the overall processes. It takes skilled labor (people), a number of processes working in concert and a lot of tooling, systems, raw materials, etc., to build a commercial airplane. Basically, People, Processes and Tools become the ‘three legged stool’ – if any one of these three aren’t up to par, the stool becomes wobbly.
Process Diagrams – My Bucket Diagrams
Image from Boeing’s 787 double plus chord https://www.caltechprecision.com/products.html
One of the tasks I was asked to do at the time was to help justify why we needed any new generation systems (PDM/PLM) to help define airplane configuration and communicate this information to a new manufacturing resource management system. We needed to educate upper management. To do this I needed detailed data. I decided to follow one specific part through the design-build process – the part that holds the ‘tail’ or horizontal stabilizer together on the Boeing 777. I spent a month interviewing everyone who had anything to do with this part. It was a significant part in that we designed it and built it entirely in-house. It was called a double plus chord, because it looks like two plus signs stacked together and extruded over a curved distance of around 18 feet. After gathering all of the prints and data related to this part I put the paper in a three-ring binder about four inches thick. Then I modeled the entire process in a familiar ‘buckets and hoses’ approach.
Image courtesy of J. Doxey
Once I had modeled this, I was asked by my manager to put each bucket in a relative timeline for when each discipline started their activities. The results were:
Original documentation on my Bucket Diagram from 1993. Image courtesy of J. Doxey
One of the results of showcasing the bucket diagram is that people (including management) could visualize the end-to-end processes. The double plus chord (used for the first 777 airplanes) were complex and illustrating the process in a simple form proved useful. The epiphany for me was that in talking with all of the folks surrounding this part, not too many people even on the team knew about the challenges holistically speaking. For example, one of the bigger challenges was that Engineering selected a material type to avoid crack propagation, since the part is buried deeply inside the plane. Unfortunately, this material was nearly impossible to machine, because it was so ‘gummy’. Therefore, out of the nine extrusions (raw material) acquired for the first run of the machining, the shop scrapped five of these to get the first one right! (But Engineering didn’t know about this problem initially because the machining was scheduled for 18 months after the design was complete.) Additionally, the system for design and manufacturing was on a mainframe at the time and the procurement system was on an incompatible mini-computer which didn’t communicate with the shop floor. They didn’t know that over half of the extrusions were scrapped and there was a six month lead time to get new replacement extrusions.
Conclusion
Perhaps you can relate to some of these challenges or maybe you’ve never seen this type of thing at your company. In my travels every company could build their own “bucket diagram” based on their own processes and supply chain. Having a complete end to end view of how product gets done is key. However complex your processes are, the effective coordination of People, Processes and Tools is essential to be able to shrink your time to market and make efficient products without the friction of a discombobulated vending machine. I can’t tell where Boeing will be in the future, but hopefully they can figure out their processes and people issues quickly to be able to work together for a productive future. I’ve heard that they’ve asked some of the ‘wise men’ or former Boeing CEOs (i.e., Alan Mulally and Ray Conner) to advise the newly appointed CEO (who has less than six months on the job) on the best path forward. Many are wishing my former employer only the best, as it is a keystone to the U.S. manufacturing base and one of the largest exporters in the world. It may be ‘too big to fail’ but in reality everything goes through a lifecycle and who knows what the future will hold for this once venerable company.
Reference:
https://leehamnews.com/2024/11/09/ortberg-taps-mulally-connor-about-boeings-recovery/
READ MORE FROM JIM DOXEY:
https://www.qualitymag.com/articles/98236-if-its-boeing-im-not-going
