New Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Stephanie Pope has spent her first four months in the role doing a lot of listening to set a new course for the commercial aircraft division.
“I have been listening to our employees inside of our factories, listening to our regulators, and listening to our customers, said Pope. “And as a result of that, I’ve created three priorities that I’ve been focused on, and that is developing and executing our Safety and Quality Plan, that is stabilizing our factories so we can deliver safe and quality airplanes predictably, on schedule, and that is culture, said Ms Pope.
While the Safety and Quality Plan draws from input from Boeing customers, the independent assessment team, as well as regulators, Pope said that the majority of the feedback came from employees. “That is why I’m so confident in this plan. We held safety and quality stand-downs. Every employee participated. We collected more than 30,000 items of feedback and those items are what generated the genesis of the plan.
“And you can think of the summary and the plan as increasing our investment in training and employee proficiency, and skill enhancement,” she added. “You can think about it as simplifying our business processes and procedures, our build plans, reducing the defects across our supply chain and across our factories, increasing our production compliance and elevating our safety and quality culture, as well as deploying SMS throughout the entire company.”
Pope spoke at length about predictable deliveries. “I spent a lot of time, we spent a lot of time listening to our customers. Most of our customers have walked through our Safety and Quality Plan in detail. They’re very, very supportive. They recognize this isn’t minor change, this is transformational change and you all know we have slowed down our factories pretty significantly to execute that change.
“And we’re doing that so we can get back to being predictable at our deliveries. Predictable at scale. And I’m very clear with my team; this isn’t about safety and quality versus schedule. We have to do all of these items. We have to do safety, we have to do quality, and we have to meet our commitments with a predictable schedule at cost. These are not competing priorities.
“Lastly, it’s all about culture. As I said, I spent a lot of time listening to our employees. Our employees are the people that will execute this plan. They are so committed and ingrained in our mission and passionate about the products that we deliver. This is about creating a culture. I call it, “Just culture,” it’s part of our safety management system. This is making sure that we’re very clear.
“Leadership and management have a responsibility. They have a responsibility to make sure our people have the tools, the training, and the parts and everything they need to be successful. And our employees have a responsibility to follow the process and to speak up. Speak up if they need help, speak up if they see a hazard or a defect that could create a safety issue. It’s all about engagement and empowerment and accountability,” said Pope.
Pope said that Boeing is “starting to see early results, early signs.” “We’re seeing a significant improvement in the flow of our 737 factory. You know that we’ve reduced the rate pretty significantly below 38 with a commitment to get back to 38 towards the end of the year. Those production rates are meaningfully increasing month over month.
“Same on 787; we’ve reduced below five with a commitment to get to five towards the end of the year. All of those safety and quality actions that we’re doing on the 737, we’re doing across all of our factories. So you would see the same type of plans and actions being put on the floor in Charleston as you would in Renton or Everett.”
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