The Dreamliner, which is scheduled to go into general service in 2008, represents a radical change in aircraft design, being built largely from plastics and composite materials. As such, it also provided an opportunity for Hawker de Havilland, which employees around 1300 staff in Australia, to revamp its ageing IT systems and adopt a more modern approach.
Hawker de Havilland is a so-called "tier 1" aircraft component supplier, building components for Boeing and a variety of other companies (including, oddly enough, Boeing's major global rival Airbus). Tier 1 suppliers play a critical role in helping manufacturers simplify their operations by allowing them to deal with just a handful of key suppliers, who in turn take on many of the complexities inherent in building modern aeroplanes, which typically have 10s of thousands of individual components.
"Being Tier 1 means we manage the entire life cycle of the product" from design to manufacture and support, said Peter McTaggart, manager of applications and architecture for Hawker de Havilland. "The move in the aerospace industry to Tier 1 has meant that the large aircraft manufacturers no longer deal with lots and lots of suppliers. We need to be able to step up our capabilities in managing our supply chain as well."
Supply chain management is critical for the company. "The materials we use are in high demand around the world," McTaggart said, noting that some supplies like titanium had delivery waiting times of up to 50 weeks. "We have to have a robust supply chain management system."
For the Dreamliner, Hawker de Havilland is responsible for producing the moveable training edge for the aircraft's wings. The design team for the project involved more than 500 people spread over five sites (Seattle, Sydney, Melbourne, Korea and Austria).
"We have a global network for engineering and design collaboration. All of the product definition, which is completely three-dimensional, is housed in Seattle and we have to collaborate across the globe." While those design components are common to multiple Boeing divisions, much of Hawker de Havilland's IT setup is specific to the division, and for several years it had recognised that the systems were failing to meet objectives.
"We're the product of a number of different mergers and acquisitions," McTaggart said. "We've got ageing, isolated core business systems. We have lots of ad-hoc integration addressing point solutions in the business, many developed by business users. There's a lot of small point solutions out there which form part of the critical operations of the organisation."
Because contracts are often worked out in advance and run for several years, efficient resource planning is critical. "For a multi-million dollar contract over several years, we can suffer substantial losses if we don't do things properly up front," McTaggart said.
The company has historically relied on two separate ERP systems, the newer of which is 20 years old while its ageing custom-developed sibling continues to run on a VAX minicomputer. "They themselves inhibit the flexibility and the agility of the business. We have a strategy of replacing those, but as these drive our scheduling and production systems, it's very hard to replace them without the lights going out. We have lags in the availability of data and a whole bunch of impediments to improving efficiencies in our business."
Production systems have also tended to rely heavily on printed paper manuals which provide detailed instructions for component assembly, complete with sign-off pages to be completed by each worker.
McTaggart says the expenditure on A4 paper simply to print these manuals tops AU$100,000 a year.
