On Boeing’s earnings call yesterday, the company sighted some of the causes of delays in shipping the new 787 Dreamliner, including a lack of information, communication, and documentation from many of the Dreamliner suppliers. There were too many surprises when sub-assemblies showed up to the Boeing’s final assembly line.
So Jim McNerney, Chairman and CEO, said they are deploying a “small army” (hundreds) of Boeing professionals (manufacturing and procurement experts) to go work in the suppliers’ facilities.
He also said this: “(we) realized we really need to work with (suppliers) to make sure we have better visibility…we need that data transparency across all of the build in order to execute the plan that we’ve laid out.”
In the management operating system of any organization, the key to reducing surprises and executing on your plan is having access (visibility) into the drivers that measure progress – whether they are inside or outside your company four walls.
We call the ‘outside’ your extranet: your suppliers, your customers, channel partners and so on. And we ascribe ‘beyond net’ to the customer of your customer, or the supplier of your supplier. There are many valid two-way information needs not only in the supply-chain (delivery time, inventory, forecast), but also with HR (contract labor, training, recruiting pipeline), Sales & Marketing (leads, campaigns, channels), and all areas of the business.
You can use the Business Foundation methodology to identify those critical value drivers across your organization and throughout your supplier ecosystem. Once identified (and self-prioritized using our database), you can measure, plan, and analyze the most material and volatile drivers – putting them in front of the decision-makers that matter.
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