What were they thinking?
 

The biggest mistake people make when talking about the outsourcing of U.S.
jobs by U.S. companies is to treat it as a moral issue.

Sure, it's immoral to abandon your loyal American workers in search of cheap
labor overseas. But the real problem with outsourcing, if you don't think it
through, is that it can wreck your business and cost you a bundle.

But much of the blame belongs to the company's quantum leap in farming out
the design and manufacture of crucial components to suppliers around the
nation and in foreign countries such as Italy, Sweden, China, and South
Korea. Boeing's dream was to save money. The reality is that it would have
been cheaper to keep a lot of this work in-house.

Rather than follow its old model of providing parts subcontractors with
detailed blueprints created at home, Boeing gave suppliers less detailed
specifications and required them to create their own blueprints.

Boeing's goal, it seems, was to convert its storied aircraft factory near
Seattle to a mere assembly plant, bolting together modules designed and
produced elsewhere as though from kits.

The drawbacks of this approach emerged early. Some of the pieces
manufactured by far-flung suppliers didn't fit together. Some subcontractors
couldn't meet their output quotas, creating huge production logjams when
critical parts weren't available in the necessary sequence.

Boeing executives now admit that the company's aggressive outsourcing put it
in partnership with suppliers that weren't up to the job. They say Boeing
didn't recognize that sending so much work abroad would demand more
intensive management from the home plant, not less.

One would have thought that the management of the world's leading aircraft
manufacturer would know that going in, before handing over millions of
dollars of work to companies that couldn't turn out a Tab A that fit
reliably into Slot A. On-the-job training for senior executives, it seems,
can be very expensive.


http://www.latimes.com/news/columnis...1160131.column

So the wrong brothers finnaly became executives at boeing.


Best Regards
Tom.