Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Stephanie Pope.
Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) CEO Stephanie Pope stressed the company’s focus on improving quality and stability in its factories during a media briefing ahead of the Farnborough Airshow opening.
“This isn’t about safety and quality versus schedule, we have to do all of these things. We have to do safety, we have to do quality, we have to meet our commitments with a predictable schedule. These are not competing priorities,” Pope said on Sunday.
Pope said the company is starting to see the early signs of improvements as a result of its ongoing safety and quality plan, with a significant improvement in flow in production of the 737.
Production rate of the 737 has dipped to as low as around 20 in recent months, but the company aims to have it back up to 38 towards the end of the year. Production is “meaningfully increasing, month over month,” Pope insisted. FAA, which has stepped up oversight of Boeing production since the in-flight blow-out of a door plug on a new Alaska Airlines 737 MAX in January, is so far holding Boeing to a monthly production cap of 38.
Production of the 787, which has also dipped below its previous rate of five a month, should be back to that rate over the same period, Pope said.
Pope’s first four months in her BCA CEO position have been largely spent in “developing and executing our safety and quality plan that’s stabilizing our factories, so we can deliver safe and quality airplanes predictably, on schedule.”
She said she was confident in the validity of the safety and quality plan because the bulk of the 30,000 pieces of feedback that had been received had come from the company’s workers, the people who actually built the aircraft.
She added that the plan could be characterized as increasing investment and training in employee proficiency, simplifying business processes and procedures and reducing defects across the company’s supply chain and in its factories.
As part of this, Boeing has hired an independent assessment team with experience in the nuclear industry—another sector with highly complex operating systems and which faces potentially severe consequences if things go wrong—to assess the factories and the new quality and safety plan.
A second priority is predictable deliveries. Most of the company’s customers have walked through Boeing’s safety and quality plan in detail and are very supportive, she said. “They have recognized that this is not minor changes; this is transformational change.”
The company’s factories had been slowed down “pretty significantly to execute that change and we’re doing that, to get back to being predictable in our deliveries.”
Asked about complaints from customers over late deliveries, she recognized their frustrations. However, they had remained supportive, she said, “that we make the right changes now so that we transform this business, and we don’t make incremental change and find ourselves having issues again in the future.”
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