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Boeing Supply Chain Management Essay

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4-3 Short Paper: The Boeing Company A supply chain is a series of integrated processes within and across a company that produce a product or service to meet the demands of a consumer (Krajewski, et. al., 2013). Every company has a specific supply chain design and this design is implemented to meet the company’s competitive priorities. Supply chain management refers to the coordination of the company’s processes with those of customers and suppliers to match the flow of services, materials, and information with customer demand. In today’s global market companies are choosing to outsource many of their processes in order to save time and money. While outsourcing and decentralizing many supply processes may seem to be more cost effective, …show more content…

This resulted in suppliers who did not input accurate and timely information, in part due to cultural differences and lack of trust. Neither Tier 1 suppliers nor Boeing became aware of problems in a timely fashion which was time consuming and costly. The second set of problems with the 787 project arose from a lack of oversight and quality control (Denning, 2013). The Tier 1 suppliers were put in charge of coordinating Tier 2 and 3 suppliers however there were no funds or manpower set aside to assist these suppliers with issues or concerns. Tier 1 suppliers ran into issues surrounding time zone differences, language differences, and cultural differences. Many of the Tier 1 suppliers did not possess the necessary skills to manage Tier 2 suppliers nor the know-how to develop different sections of the aircraft. This resulted in significant delays and costly training sessions with the Tier 1 suppliers. Boeing did not anticipate the additional costs associated with these issues. The company ran into quality issues early as some of the parts did not fit together properly as a result of improper quality control and training (Hiltzik, 2011). With the past production of the aircraft 737 and 747, Boeing gave suppliers detailed blueprints of parts in order to assure proper specifications and quality. Instead of following this old model for the 787, Boeing gave suppliers less detailed specifications and required them to create their

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