The Boeing Company, commonly known as Boeing, is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, telecommunications equipment, and missiles worldwide.
Boeing has used TQM for a long time and is still using it. In Boeing all employees contribute to the quality using Self inspection and acceptance, This method allowed the company to reduce numbers of inspectors, instead all employees have the responsibility to check the quality before delivering. Employees receive training to be able to inspect and make sure that quality standards are respected. Most Boeing employees are familiar with total quality management and lean manufacturing. A lean and efficient operation is the heart of the Boeing Production System and is crucial to Commercial Airplanes’ success in the global marketplace. The Boeing Production System is composed of several elements that work in concert to ensure an output of the highest-quality cost-effective products in the least amount of time.
The Boeing Production System uses a mix of quality management methods: Total quality management, Lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, value streams, global manufacturing and managing supplier relationships—are all elements that are critical to the company’s competitiveness. Value stream of building an aeroplane: value streams represent the overall production flow of building an aeroplane, from raw material to finished output. Value streams are opportunities to cut costs and increase efficiencies. By breaking down all aspects of producing an aeroplane into manageable chunks—or streams—of activity, it becomes easier to identify areas for improvement. It reduces costs and improves quality. In Commercial Airplanes, Boeing uses methods of successful Japanese companies like Toyota.
The Boeing Production System and the Boeing Quality Management System are inextricably linked, as Manufacturing and Quality organizations work together to achieve total customer satisfaction through a lean production system. Quality is the responsibility of everyone in the company, all are accountable, and all are empowered to ensure that defects are not passed on The goal of any manufacturing production system is to have quality embedded in the product—not automated, but automatic.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issues a production certificate to a manufacturer after the company demonstrates it has adequate facilities and quality-control systems in place to ensure it meets stringent safety and reliability requirements.
Boeing meets compliance requirements through continuous improvement and executive involvement. More than just metrics, Quality management system is both a quality system and a management system. The quality system ensures total customer satisfaction and “doing it right the first time.” The company implemented high tech detectors for quality checks and plan to reduce the number of inspectors to 2550 in 2020 instead of 3000. The management system ensures the requirements, processes, tools and capabilities.
It also ensures employees are engaged and take responsibility for producing quality products and proactively seek opportunities to improve their processes. In the manufacturing arena, many are using a process that supports the Quality Management System, called Self-Inspection and Acceptance. SI&A gives an employee who makes a product or performs a task the tools, training, and responsibility to measure and review the product or task to determine conformance to requirements. One of the methodologies helping Boeing Commercial Airplanes meet the challenge of change is Six Sigma. Six Sigma helps manufacturers to design, build and deliver near-perfect products by reducing defects and variation, and improving quality, resulting in substantial cost savings. Specifically, Six Sigma refers to manufacturing processes that produce a level of quality at 3.4 defects per million opportunities. Most U.S. companies operate at a rate of 66,807 defects per million, or “3.0 Sigma. The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure how many defects you have in a process, you can figure out systematically how to eliminate them and get as close to zero defects as possible. Six Sigma is a useful tool to help us find the root causes of quality issues.
