BOEING, THE 787, AND OUTSOURCING
Here’s Ed from Gin and Tacos in a lovely rant on outsourcing in general, and in particular Boeing aircraft, the 787 Dreamliner, and the fact that over 70% of the construction of the plane was outsourced to more than 900 contractors and sub-contractors in dozens of nations.
Oh, and that just this week the entire fleet of 787 aircraft worldwide was grounded due to catastrophic systems failures.
“Boeing is starting to realize that outsourcing and cheap labor are good at making really inexpensive disposable goods. Consumer electronics. Clothes. Shoes. Toys. It’s not so good at making the most complex machines ever devised by mankind, which happen to have a very low tolerance for system failures. If your Reeboks fall apart or your Blu-Ray player craps out, you’re probably going to be irritated. If the electrical subsystems on an aircraft stop working, you’re probably going to be dead. Yes, aircraft like this have redundant systems and not every failure results in a catastrophe. But we’re not talking about a new iPhone here, where the attitude in development can be, “Just release it and we’ll shake out all the bugs in the first year.”
The issues with this airplane should not be overblown, but they should not be interpreted solely as problems with one product from one company. This is an important example of the limited benefits of outsourcing and other “globalization” practices. As I’ve said many times before, it makes things cheaper. That’s what it does. That’s all it does. It does not make things better, safer, or even necessarily faster. It’s merely a way to pay fewer people in high-wage countries as a means of maximizing profits. The idea that Boeing would assemble a bunch of components made by hundreds of different contractors into the most technologically advanced airliner in the world shows how little value is given to quality and safety in comparison to penny-pinching.”
January 24th, 2013 at 12:58 am
His rant is a bit off.
For one thing, aircraft and automobiles are two easily understandable examples of outsourcing. Many components of each have always been made by outside suppliers. We might recall the fact that Ford would have been seriously threatened by GM and Chrysler closing, as their common suppliers for seats, instruments, and many dozen other components might have been forced to close.
I think the main problem with the 787 is that Boeing more or less skipped a generation, and there was too much of the new and unproven, and too many suppliers who did not deliver what they promised. Maybe I am wrong, and the Chicago Boeing was too much into bean counting, as compared to the Seattle Boeing, which created the 747.
In any case, outsourcing is part of many industries, and it does NOT necessarily mean “buying cheap components from odd countries to avoid American labor costs”.
BTW, I would love to start a campaign against outsourcing call centers overseas. I think Americans understand me quicker and waste less of my time.
January 24th, 2013 at 6:50 am
The word I hear from the site in South Carolina is that the products coming in are not up to specs and have to be repaired before use.
January 24th, 2013 at 2:02 pm
Well yes and no for the rant.
The first part is in a ever more risk adverse industry my money would be on that these problems have gained notoriety because in aviation we are taught to make a big deal out of all systems failures, the trend these days towards TEM (threat and error management) extends beyond the cockpit to all sections of flight ops. I bet it wouldn’t have been treated as anywhere near as serious 40 years ago when the 747 was released. Then it would have been written up in a few Maintenance Releases, Boeing would have issued an Airworthiness Directive if it was cheap to fix and no one would be the wiser. Or worse still, they would have waited until it downed an aircraft. Everyone is banging on about a battery fault with the 787 but no one remembers the faulty over-centre latches for the forward cargo door that downed a couple of 747′s completely?
Secondly, in a society completely driven by cost, what do you expect? In an industry that has for years been in a race for the bottom, with everything falling along the wayside, how long was it before the aircraft themselves start to feel the increasing cost forces? It costs me $100 to fly from Sydney to Brisbane in a jet, that’s cheaper than the petrol to drive it in a shitty car. We lost customer service, we lost food service, crew training started to get eroded. Aircraft were always going to be in the firing line.
January 25th, 2013 at 1:19 pm
Garbage in, Garbage out.