Late last month in New York City, Bombardier CEO Pierre Beaudoin addressed the Wings Club, mounting a defense of his company’s aerospace unit’s CSeries program. Beaudoin’s tone was confident, rebutting the arguments of the duopoly the Canadian airframer is facing, despite the CSeries competition with only the smallest Boeing and Airbus models.
The complete 22min unedited audio of the speech was posted by Bombardier and is available above.
Afterward, Beaudoin took questions from the audience, and I asked – despite his extended defense of the CSeries’s market and execution – what was keeping Mr. Beaudoin up at night about the development of the new 110 to 149-seat aircraft.
His reply:
I think one of the challenges in our industry – if you talk about aerospace – is to manage these very complex development projects with as much visibility as we can. And I think that’s the challenge, when we push our teams enough to get the maximum out of them at the same time not to push them too much so they stop reporting problems.
I think one of the big challenges in aviation is when there’s an airplane development, it’s easy to criticize your engineering team and say, you know, “don’t bring those problems to me”, but if you say that as leaders we’re not going to hear about the problems.
We have to realize these are huge projects, we put about 100,000 parts together, they have to come together, they have to work and they have to deliver the performance. To be supportive and at the same time to challenge the team.
So, that’s one of the challenges that keeps me up. Are we pushing enough? At the same time are we hearing about all the issues? Because you are investing millions and millions and you want to not disappoint your customer and build your products on time.
Beaudoin’s answer was a fascinating one, and a natural concern while looking at the recent history of troubled aerospace programs, but his comment suggests that the internal transparency of the program is something that concerns him. Beaudoin appears to ask a question of culture, where teams organized to “get the maximum out” of each member.
A central component of Dr. Theodore F. Piepenbrock’s Evolution of Business Ecosystems – or Red/Blue – examines the relationship structure, or architecture, of organizations. The CSeries supply chain, which closely mirrors that of the 787’s globally distributed model, places an emphasis on a more-transactional, less-integrated architecture, with design and manufacturing responsibility located outside the four walls of Bombardier. In a mature market like commercial aerospace, an integral – or “Red” – model has demonstrated itself to yield sustained long-term success, says Piepenbrock’s work.
This “modular” or “Blue” architecture between stakeholders, is one that the airframer is familiar: “We know our processes work, ever since the Global [Express] we’ve been making planes like this with international supply chains so we know it works,” said Bombardier’s Ben Boehm in October 2010. In short, Bombardier aims to do “blue” better than Boeing did on 787.
Would Beaudoin’s concerns be different if the Bombardier’s commercial aerospace programs were organized differently?
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This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.