Airbus vs Boeing

A tough quarter for Airbus, whichhas announced two-year delays on its A380 aircraft and the causeappears to be out-of-sync design practices.
Airbus announced the delays after finding that its designs do not match in final assembly, particularly in the case of wiring.

Atough quarter for Airbus, which has announced two-year delays on itsA380 aircraft and the cause appears to be out-of-sync design practices.

Airbus announced the delays after finding that its designs do not match in final assembly, particularly in the case of wiring. To its credit, Airbus blames itself versus suppliers or vendors like Dassault, stating they were tardy in implementing Dassault’s 3D digital mock-up applications. As AMR Research Vice President MikeBurkett described to us, “Airbus has said themselves, they had four different European sites, particularly the one between Germany and France, with different versions of the design applications, and they’ve run into challenges of sharing data between sites. The challenge Airbus had was keeping track of deployment, as much as the technology itself.”

Boeing uses the same Dassault applications, but deploys them more uniformly. And they do so across their supply chain.Says Burkett, “I believe, and it’s an estimate, that 80 percent of the[Dreamliner] is being manufactured externally, which is a first forBoeing. They’re doing most of the design, but they have partners doing a lot of the design as well, and at least key partners in that process need to be leveraging similar applications.

“So a take away is that as companies start to move design into outsourced partners, they need to move to more modular design to make sure the parts interchange.”

“The interoperability challenge in CAD systems has existed for years,” says Burkett, and described how in Aerospace,infrastructures can be hastily built to support a new program. “So if you’re tying the future success of your company to new product introduction, you’d better be paying attention to the underlying infrastructure to support that strategic decision.”