Airbus saga the latest on complexity and communications
By Kevin Parker, editorial director -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/1/2006 6:00:00 AM
"For all the complexity, the mistakes grew out of relatively simple lapses in communications. Engineers at Toulouse [France], and at the Airbus plant in Hamburg, Germany, tweaked the design of the A380 on a digital blueprint, but sometimes did not update each other on what they were doing."—The New York Times, July 17, 2006
No better illustration of the challenges that product life-cycle management (PLM) systems are meant to address could be found than European aerospace manufacturer Airbus' unfolding fiasco with its 555-seat, flagship A380 jet, leading to significant delays and a revised schedule to produce only nine A380s next year, instead of the originally projected 25.
Fortune magazine quoted Charles Champion, director of the A380 program, speaking at the Farnborough International Airshow 2006, as admitting, "We have many legacy systems that do not talk to each other."
According to The New York Times, most of the problems have to do with wiring in the A380 more complex than in any existing plane. The equivalent of 312 miles of electrical wiring is threaded through the A380 in thick bundles called harnesses. Each harness carries different combinations of wires depending, for example, on the demands of different airline customers.
The miscommunication meant that when sections of the plane's fuselage were shipped for final assembly and workers began installing the wiring, they found brackets and walls where they weren't supposed to be. Workers had to remove entire bundles and start over, and Airbus had to go to its suppliers for new wires.
Tom Williams, an executive VP with Airbus, was quoted as saying, "We perhaps underestimated the complexity of the aircraft. We perhaps underestimated the customization. Were we complacent, arrogant? I don't think we were, but maybe." In any case, an executive management shake-up and billions of dollars in losses are the result.
As Fortune points out, however, Airbus' problems may have as much to do with its complex management structure as it does its systems. Airbus is 80-percent owned by EADS, the European aerospace consortium, which itself is owned by DaimlerChrysler, France's Sogeade, and Spain's SEPI, with the remaining 50 percent publicly traded. EADS has two CEOs and two nonexecutive chairmen.
Building the world's most complex aircraft in an environment bound to be rife with competing agendas—not to mention cultural and language differences—seems the very recipe for disaster, belied only by Airbus' hitherto unblemished record of success beginning in the mid-1990s.
As if in counterpoint, Airbus' archrival, Boeing, announced at Farnborough that it would standardize on the UGS life-cycle management solution for future commercial airplanes and defense-system programs.
According to Dave Fennell, a Boeing VP of information technology responsible for companywide design and support of PLM systems, "The broad use of Teamcenter with 30,000 users at Commercial Airplanes on our DCAD/MRM implementation, and success on our JDAM program, have shown the benefits of Teamcenter's open platform and scalability, and reinforces our decision to make Teamcenter Boeing's enterprise data management system going forward."
