Have you ever noticed that when a new product comes out, whether it's a new type of car or a new computer operating system, there always seems to be a bunch of bugs in it for a year or so. This seems to hold especially true for very complex products, like aircraft. In fact, you could probably make a generalization that "the more complex the design or product the greater the likelihood of problems with it." So when the Boeing 787 Dreamliners began to have problems, even before they got off the assembly line, I wasn't entirely surprised to hear that as much as 30% of the production of parts for the plane had been outsourced to companies offshore, although the final assembly was kept in the US. Here Boeing is building a radical new design, with new composite materials and cutting edge technologies and it scatters it's parts production across the globe, in many time zones , companies and countries with a variety of languages. Common sense would seem to dictate that such a highly experimental and complex project should have been kept closer to home, with more reliable suppliers that could have been more easily supervised.
The folks at Boeing are very bright and have been building jetliners for years, so what gives? Is it the corporate herd mentality that seemed to prompt Boeing to move it's headquarters from Seattle to Chicago so they could rub elbows with the big boys? Is that same lemming like thinking driving Boeing's management to push off shoring because everyone else is? Is this some sort of strategy to break into the Chinese aircraft market to try to secure future growth prospects there? Or, is it just about money, cutting overhead, cheaper labor and the like? Unions are tough to deal with and skilled American workers demand good wages and benefits unlike those in many other countries.
So, I wonder, how is this new offshore strategy working out? Boeing, now has a new jetliner that's three years behind schedule and all 50 planes it had in service have been grounded by the FAA. I'm sure that in time the engineers at Boeing will get the bugs worked out of this plane but I'll bet that things are pretty intense back in Chicago right now. In the mean time we are all getting a very public demonstration of the difference between "Made in America" and "Assembled in America."
Here's an interesting article I ran across on this subject:
Is this just about working out the bugs in a complex design or is it really about corporate greed? What do you think?
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