“The Boeing 767: From Concept to Production (A)”
...from design characteristics, such as weight, speed, and length, and historical relationships, such as the number of parts per airplane. The most critical calculations involved the assembly labor hours. The estimates were carefully fine-tuned to make sure of accuracy. Since they had more sophisticated machines in this production, they new they would have fewer labor hours compared to past productions. All of the parametric estimates were combined to form a final, adjusted estimate of the total assembly. The same type of process was used in this phase to develop the Master Phasing Plan. This plan establishes the program schedule and identifies the major milestones. Once the cost definition was completed, the supplier management system was developed. To complete the 767, it would consist of 3.1 million parts, which would be supplied by 1,300 vendors. Of these vendors, the most important were the two program participants. They were; Japan Aircraft Development Company (JADC) and Aeritalia. Their engineers worked closely with Boeing engineers to help develop skill levels that were adequate. A decision to move manufacturing plants close to the water helped with the logistics of getting the parts to Seattle and helped speed up the production time of the 767. The production management phase moved in to start producing the 767’s. They knew they would have a long lead time to meet the planned rollout of the first airplane. The plant was split up into two halves. The first half was devoted to assembly of major subsections, where the other half was used for the final assembly. Every four days, partially completed planes would move from one station to the next. In this production phase there were two major tasks of concern. They were; maintaining schedule and learning curves. This is all due to the configurations always changing. These changes came from internal and external sources. Most of them were simple changes but none the less, they were changes that slowed production. To ensure the schedule was meet, Boeing employed a Management Visibility System that allowed all management personnel to be aware of what was going on upstream and downstream of them in the production system. This system became crucial to the success of the project. The most considerable weakness that Boeing showed in the project management of the 767 was the conversion to a two-seated cockpit. The majority of the airlines they did business with expressed an interest in having their planes delivered with this conversion already in place. The problem was they had already built thirty planes with the three-seated cockpit at that point. They would have to turn all thirty of these planes around and put them back into production to convert them to a two-seated design. Boeing said the impact was not very large but when y...