
The 787's Problems Run Deeper Than Outsourcing - hype7
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/the_787s_problems_run_deeper_t.html
======
michael_miller
I really wish people would stop speculating about the 787s problems. Yes, it
has had serious issues. But why is the author qualified to talk about them?
From his bio, it's not clear that he has any aviation experience, and he
doesn't appear to have any inside sources.

The article is littered with phrases like "My hypothesis is that McDonnell's
mindset from its defense work — minimizing the amount of capital put at risk
during R&D — was applied to the 787" and "But, in this instance, it wasn't so
much the outsourcing, as it was the decision to modularize a complicated
problem too soon". How can the author make such brazen claims without having
talked to a Boeing engineer or visited the factory? I assume if he had done
either, he would have noted it in the article.

Only one type of person is qualified to comment on the problems: a person
working at Boeing, or someone talking to him/her. Otherwise, we're just
playing the Apple rumor game, piecing together tidbits of supply chain data to
come up with the conclusion we want to hear.

~~~
caycep
it's a bit of a gray line - it's being published on HBR which is a "Big Name
Publication" to a certain extent. that being said, it IS a blog, and blogs are
for random musings such as this...

~~~
michael_miller
"Big Name Publications" do not get a free pass for speculation, in print or in
blog. They gain credibility, so they can say things like "From talking to
senior Boeing engineers, we uncovered..." but making up hypotheses out of thin
air is shoddy journalism that should be criticized, regardless of the source.

------
acomjean
I think the article gets it. I worked as a Boeing subcontractor on a radar
system. Boeing really seemed to want to get into the government contract game,
a different beast than commercial aviation. They were making more on defense
contracts than commercial aviation (although that seems to have changed back
the past couple years).

quote: The thing about these Government contracts is that they are paid as
development proceeds. This is entirely different — and a lot less risk.

~~~
jordanb
Boeing _is_ in the government contracting game. They're the second biggest
military contractor after Lockheed.

Military contracts are low risk for the contractor because the government
absorbs all the overruns, but relatively low profit as well since the
contracts specify the amount of profit the company is allowed to earn.

Boeing's huge military contract business is good, steady money, but the
commercial aviation business is where they take the lion's share of their
profits.

That being said, it seems like both Airbus (EADS) and Boeing are profoundly
dysfunctional organizations that are really incapable of doing anything
without consuming enormous resources. I wonder if both of them have the
"military contractor" mindset built into their corporate culture, and that's
why their commercial projects are a serial set of disasters.

I think A&B are lucky to have each other as competitors. If a lean, hungry
company ever entered the market it'd wipe the floor with both of them.

~~~
phillc73
Stepping up into the biggest end of commercial aviation is a big, big ask.

There are already a number of aircraft manufacturers playing in the next tier
- Bombardier (Dash 8), Embraer (EMB 120), Fokker (F50) and others. I can't
really see them ever building something the size of a 787 or A380, but I
concede it could be possible.

Looking at existing manufacturers, I think Antonov may stand a chance. They
already have the AN-124 and AN-225, which might be engineered into passenger
configuration.

With regards to new players, I was reading an article about the Indian company
Mahindra yesterday[1]. They have ambitious aerospace plans, already some
exposure to the sector through their purchase of GippsAero[2], obviously with
much smaller aircraft, but also are located in a fast growing market. The
article mentions Boeing's expectation of over 1,000 new commercial airliners
needed in India by 2020. Maybe this is your new lean, hungry company.

[1] [http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/indian-
automobile-...](http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/indian-automobile-
maker-mahindra-eyes-aerospace-381544/?cmpid=SOC|FGFG|twitterfeed|Flightglobal)

[2] <http://www.gippsaero.com>

~~~
assemble
Bombardier also build CRJs, business jets (Globals, Challengers and Learjets),
does government work and builds fire-fighting aircraft. Oh, and the C-Series
is a brand new a/c entering into the lower end of the Boeing market.

That being said, building even these small aircraft is a multi-billion dollar
investment. If people here think that software design is hard. It takes a
monumental amount of work to design a commercial aircraft and the
manufacturing processes around it. Oh, and then there is the test phase. That
part is fun.

------
hencq
As a counter point, outsourcing has served the car industry quite well. At one
point in its lifetime Ford had it's own rubber tree farms. Nowadays car
companies rely a lot on suppliers and heavily involve them in design as well.
It's just very unlikely that one company has the skills and the focus to be
good at everything.

That said (and the article makes this point as well) suppliers have to be
closely involved for this model to work. When Toyota was consistently beating
American car manufacturers in terms of quality one of the biggest differences
was in how they managed their suppliers. American companies tended to have
multiple suppliers for the same parts and determine (sub) contracts mainly on
a cost basis. Toyota on the other hand had very long term relationships with
its suppliers and worked much more intensely with them.

~~~
nickpinkston
I don't think this is a counterpoint. They said that it makes sense to be
vertical early on. Look at the Ford Rouge Works where iron ore and rubber came
in one side and Model A's came off the other.

Now, it's a very mature category where it's all about refinement, not major
innovation - so it's good to develop an interchangeable supplier base because
you increase competition between them and you don't need to do anything
radical.

If you look at SpaceX for example, they make >90% of their parts because
there's full-stack innovation going on constantly.

~~~
hencq
> Now, it's a very mature category where it's all about refinement, not major
> innovation

I disagree. You are completely right that in that situation it makes sense to
develop an interchangeable supplier base. as you mention it allows you to
increase competition and put pressure on them to reduce costs.

However, in a situation where you're still looking for innovation, like
developing a new car (or plane) it makes sense to work with highly integrated
suppliers. These won't be interchangeable and because you're very dependent on
them, the opportunities for cost saving are probably smaller. On the other
hand, because they have specialized knowledge and skills they can actually
help you innovate much faster. At least that's the theory; you're right that
SpaceX seems to focus on doing as much as possible in-house and it seems to
work for them. A reason could be however, that the type of suppliers necessary
to make this model work are just not there (yet) in their business.

I guess in practice it's about finding the right balance. Insisting on doing
everything yourself can lead to bad cases of NIH syndrome, while outsourcing
everything leads to a loss of control.

~~~
nickpinkston
Yea, totally agree, but something like cars have far less variation than do
SpaceX's rockets. Say, the automatic transmission isn't massively coupled
(engineer constraint wise) to the rest of the car unless you're doing a hybrid
or something.

That means the local improvement (better gears, weight reduction, etc.) is
most of the improvement - not in conjunction with much else. It's why you'll
often find struts from a 1999 model that are drop-in replacements for the 2012
even though the cars look very different.

------
jamesseattle
I worked on two airplane programs at boeing. The first was a derivative of the
747, the 747-400. The main features of this version that differed from
previous 747s were going from analog to digital avionics, a slightly longer
body and new (larger) wings. The schedule from project launch to first
delivery was about 4 years. We were two weeks late on first delivery.

I also worked on the 787. The difference between the 787 and every previous
Boeing plane was almost everything. The schedule from project launch to first
delivery was about 4 years. We were two years late.

Moral: don't bite off more than you can chew.

------
kdsudac
Went to see one of the Boeing leaders talk specifically about the dreamliner's
development a few years ago at a Georgia Tech symposium.

He made a point to mention how many different international suppliers were
involved and how that was a huge challenge. e.g. They had to custom modify
several 747s to increase the cargo hold to fit some of the sub-assemblies.

He gave the impression that part of why there were so many different sub-
contractors is to appease foreign governments--especially since many airlines
are nationalized. The corporate equivalent of pork-barrel spending.

------
graeham
Seems a bit pre-mature for the conclusions of this article. The article is
motivated by the grounding of the plane due to battery issues, but its not yet
clear what is causing these batteries problems. In otherwords, the article's
argument would still be true if there were no battery issues, but I think
readers are more interested in the context of these problems.

Generally I agree with the thesis of the article - aircraft are incredibly
complex and require both modularization and top-level design management. And
the article does make a good point that this kind of framework is needed for
this scale of projects - whether module are worked on "insourced" or
"outsourced". I think a potential issue with outsourcing is that geographic
and organizational isolation probably leads itself to tougher integration.

~~~
willvarfar
The article cites a long list of delays and problems, does it not?

~~~
joezydeco
I get the feeling the market had forgotten about the delays until this current
situation. Planes were shipping in a highly visible fashion.

~~~
jessaustin
Delays in the introduction of new models are extremely common in aerospace. If
these battery issues had been noticed by the right people sooner the 787 would
have been delayed more than it was. Very few airlines would have cancelled
orders over that.

------
andrewcooke
from the linked boeing paper:

 _if outsourcing is to be employed, it is understood to be absolutely
necessary that detailed parts and subassemblies be designed with that process
in mind. this requires considerable additional upfront effort in planning to
avoid the situation whereby major subassemblies do not fit together at final
assembly, increasing the cost by orders of magnitude more than was saved by
designing in isolation from the work allocation activities._

forgive typos - cut + paste from pdf not working.

there's more good stuff about the timescales over which outsourcing for low
labour is appropriate.

[https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6974...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/69746/hart-
smith-on-outsourcing.pdf)

------
Osiris
All this speculation about what's happening from people that aren't aware of
the facts reminds me of something that happened to me the other day.

A top manager in my company came to give our office an all-hands meeting about
management changes. During that, he claimed that my product (Online Calendar)
doesn't support timezones and bashed it in front of the whole group.

After the meeting my manager and I confronted him and told him that the
problem was with the iOS Calendar application since we're only providing data
via CalDav. He was insistent that because we have control of the data that it
is, in the end, our fault and a problem with our software.

My boss's boss gets involved and immediately recognized that the problem is
that the phone had a setting enabled that removed automatic timezone switching
for the Calendar app. A quick change to that setting and the iOS calendar was
showing events in the current (Mountain) timezone rather than his home
(Pacific) timezone.

So, even someone who's worked in tech for a long time and has a pretty good
understanding of things like protocols can still have no idea what they are
talking about without all the relevant information.

------
redwood
Odd thesis: essentially that not outsourcing, but outsourcing _too early_ in
design is the problem. Well I don't exactly think you can divorce the
two...Once you make a choice to outsource larger and larger components, you're
inherently losing control of the design and perhaps more importantly exact
construction of those components. In so doing you open yourself to design
risk. The way the author describes the primary risk of outsourcing as
"business profit risk" is odd to me.

Still the article is ridiculous considering the 787's battery problem, if
indeed limited only to the battery, seems like it will be a fairly simple one
to fix, and an isolated incident.

I like how he lists three 787 problems, two of which are "smoke in cabin" and
"fire" as if the latter two aren't likely the same root cause. Sure fuel
leaking was an issue too. So we work around it.

This is typical of the internet era where we can nitpick everything and then
suddenly a multi-decade project comes along and we don't know how to handle
its optimization/fix process.

~~~
hype7
You might think it's odd, but it's exactly what Boeing had done in the past.

And if you think the 787's problems are confined to its batteries, please read
this: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21230940> "Keith Hayward, head of
research at the Royal Aeronautical Society, said that if the issue is no
longer about replacing a faulty battery, it raised the prospect of Boeing
having to do a major re-design.

"I think people had their fingers crossed that it was a battery fault... it
looks more systemic and serious to me. I suspect it could be difficult to
identify the cause," he said."

(Disclosure: I'm the article's author)

Cheers

\-- james

------
robomartin
Oh, please folks, temper your enthusiasm to hang these guys. For all we know
it might very well be grotesquely misplaced.

As I stated in another thread, I'd prefer to read commentary from someone who
has actually had first-level access to the relevant design and test
documentation. Everything else is nothing more than conjecture.

What are some of the failure modes of battery systems, including Li-based
systems?

OK, here's an incomplete list that has nothing whatsoever to do with the 787
case because, well, no design and test data has been released. Again, this has
nothing to do with the 787. Think of it as the start of a list of things to
watch out for if you were going to set out to design a battery pack and
related systems.

    
    
        Sourcing
            - Latent defects due to manufacturing QA issues
            - With Li-based cells such things as humidity content can
              be critical as they might lead to the generation of methane
              gas during the service life of the cell.
    
        Assembly
            - Handling and storage problems
            - Mechanical damage, from dropping a cell to any number of 
              imaginable issues.
            - Assembly defects that can lead to (I**2)*R heating issues
    
        Testing (both at by supplier and OEM)
            - Failure to detect defects (sometimes impossible if internal)
            - A faulty testing process that actually causes or accelerates damage
              to cells, perhaps only cells that have specific problems
            - Inadequate issue escalation workflow
    
        Electrical
            - (I**2)*R heating of faulty interconnects (inter-cell and elsewhere)
            - Component defects that can lead to (I**2)*R heating issues
            - Oxide formation that can lead to (I**2)*R heating issues
            - Interconnect crimp quality problems that can lead to (I**2)*R 
              heating issues
            - Interconnect crimp quality problems that can lead to other issues
            - Main pack electronics problems
                This can include chargers and monitoring electronics
                - Charge termination failure or inadequacy
                - Thermal sensing failure or inadequacy
                - Pressure sensing failure or inadequacy
                - Fluid sensing failure or inadequacy
                - Inadequate semiconductor rating (for example: operating temperature)
                - Inadequate power semiconductor heat dissipation
                    This doesn't necessarily mean bath thermal design.  
                    It could be caused by inadequate or faulty mounting of TIL 
                    (thermal interface materials).
                    It could also be caused by mechanical and environmental issues 
                    affecting the TIL or the mating of the semiconductor to the heat
                    dissipation mechanism.  For example, vibration.
                - Inadequate or faulty failover modes
                - Static damage to semiconductors during electronics assembly, testing 
                  or general handing
                - PCB via or trace fractures, contamination or over-etching
                - BGA ball soldering problems 
                    (mostly only visible via x-ray inspection)
                - Bad, cold, fractured or chemically compromised solder joints
                - Dendrite buildup in lead-free solder chemistry leading to shorts 
                  in small pitch components
                - Unaccounted race conditions
                    Example: pull-pull technologies without adequate dead-band
                - Thermally-induced failures due to changes in operating 
                  characteristics of components as temperature fluctuates.  
                    Example: The aforementioned push-pull topology where the deadband
                    might have been adequate within a certain temperature range but 
                    causing shot-through shorts outside of this range.
                - Unaccounted for effects of such environmental issues as humidity.
                    Example: Many VCO chips do not deal with humidity very well,
                    particularly if it can condensate.
                - Faulty or non-existing conformal coating
                - Inadequate static damage counter measures 
                    (inputs, anything expose to handling)
            - Sub-pack electronics problems
                This is applicable if a large pack is made from a multitude of 
                smaller packs, each with it's own control and monitoring electronics.
                Sub-pack electronics can suffer from the same issues as the main pack
                electronics above.
    
        Software
            - Myriad of code-based issues 
               (lock-ups, endless loops, pointer problems, uncaught exceptions, etc.)
            - Software problems caused by hardware issues
               Example: Static damage to a chip causing a bit to unexpectedly flip.
               If not caught in software this can lead to catastrophic failure
    
        Mechanical
            - Faulty inspection and certification process
            - Inadequate design materials
            - Adequate materials but supplier quality issues resulted in unexpected 
              materials issues
            - Inadequate design tolerances 
            - Adequate design tolerances but faulty assembly, subcontractor or testing
              process caused them to be violated
            - Faulty fasteners
            - Faulty fastener application
            - Unexpected interference between components
            - Mechanical pinching or chafing of wires
            - Mechanical puncture damage to cells during installation or operation
            - Mechanical abrasion to protective cell wall or packaging
            - Insufficient mechanical rigidity
            - Insufficient venting mechanism
            - Insufficient containment or venting of gasses (methane), 
              flames or heat
            - Mechanical issues once pack is installed
                - Thermal
                - Mechanical (pinching, squeezing, twisting, cutting)
                - Resonance
    
        Thermal
            - Inadequate thermal management
            - Lack of consideration of thermal runaway problem
            - Lack of thermal isolation between individual cells or sub-packs
            - Insufficient thermal sensing
            - Insufficient thermal overload coping mechanism 
              (both mechanical and electronic)
            - A design that might cause severe differential heating of cells deep
              inside the pack
            - Inadequate electronic and mechanical fail-over measures in the case
              of thermal runaway
            - Inadequate thermal runaway detection
            - Cell supplier issues (quality control, testing, etc.)
            - Thermal issues once installed
                - Problematic heat exchange
                - Heat input from adjoining assemblies
                - Accidental plugging of filters, inlets, etc.
    
        Final release
            - Electrical testing
            - Mechanical testing
            - Environmental testing
            - Random destructive testing at the cell level
    
        Operational
            - User fails to follow published procedures
            - Alarms are ignored
            - Mechanical issues are ignored
            - Inadequate maintenance
            - Handling issues
    
    

Anyhow, this is not, by a long-shot, an exhaustive list. There's a lot I am
ignorant about and, of course, that stuff is missing. Feel free to expand.

The point is that a proper investigation would use --at a bare minimum--
something like this and, more than likely, a book full of specs and procedures
before reaching a verifiable and reproducible conclusion.

Maybe it's just me. I don't know. I just don't like it when people do some of
what is being done to Boeing. Particularly when they don't have access to the
reams of FAA, Boeing and airline data that is required to really understand
the problem.

EDIT: Formatting

~~~
primitur
>>Maybe it's just me. I don't know.

From your comment history it sure seems like you have a vested interest in
maintaining favorable PR for Boeing in this forum.

Why shouldn't the industry discuss this in open terms? The fact is we don't
have access "to the relevant design and test documentation". Boeing and their
partners won't share it. So, how can we discuss this without the data, then?

Conjecture and informed opinion is all we have, and it seems as if you have
rather a bit of the latter .. so why not share a technical analysis of the
circumstances based on your understanding rather than attempt an appeal at
what could be construed, frankly, as a PR move?

What if, Boeing are simply mis-managing the project? It surely is not the
first - nor the last - time that a major aerospace company was bit by that bug
- in fact, for anyone that pays attention to the big, fat, military-industrial
corn-fed cows of the last few decades, its rather the norm than the
exception!!

Nothing says "management really, really screwed up" than a smoking pile of
brand new tech, being doused with fire-retardant foam, while the world asks
questions like "why is our technology failing us?" from afar .. lucky, we're
not there yet with the 787 - so this is really the best time for us to be
discussing these issues. Lucky no lives are lost .. yet.

~~~
robomartin
> Conjecture and informed opinion is all we have, and it seems as if you have
> rather a bit of the latter .. so why not share a technical analysis of the
> circumstances based on your understanding rather than attempt an appeal at
> what could be construed, frankly, as a PR move?

Crap, I didn't catch that one.

Really? That's how you see what I wrote? Amazing.

Here you have an engineer (me) saying: "We don't know enough. We need facts
before we can reach a conclusion. Please stop."

And your interpretation is that I am using conjecture for PR purposes?

Are you an engineer? If you are not, maybe you just don't understand my
vantage point. And that's OK. Life goes on.

Here's an analogy, imperfect, but, what the hell:

A guy gets arrested and accused of rape.

You say: "He probably did it. Hang him!".

I say: "Let's wait and look at the evidence, which should ideally include DNA.
Then we can look at the facts as they may be available to us and make a
decision."

These are vastly different approaches to the problem.

Who would you want in the jury if YOU were the accused? Someone like me or
someone like these clowns that are flapping their jaws without having access
to the evidence?

~~~
primitur
Look, since none of us actually _have_ the data, what you're asking is that we
just simply stop discussing the issues that Boeing is having. What can we do
_but_ discuss it, at this point - no proper analysis can be made, only one
based on conjecture and experience.

Isn't it clear by this point that Boeing have a problem? Its either a) an
engineering problem, b) a management problem, or c) a combination of both.

Its not unreasonable to expect that a company with as much money, and -
frankly - unwarranted guaranteed income from the people of the United States
of America - to get its act together - and certainly, the means by which it
gets it act together is of high interest to the average denizen of hacker news
..

So, why call for people to 'not discuss it unless they are experts', then?
There are many lessons to be learned here, and we can certainly use our
intelligence - the intelligence of the whole - to make a social comment on the
issues revolving around Boeing, and in fact the entire military-industrial
machine. It has its frailties, obviously - and we are seeing them - so isn't
this of High Interest to the hacker news community?

Calling for an 'authority' to comment on this issue is hardly a way to gain
more insight into the problems of technology in this industry. The 'authority'
has already been consulted; and clearly, somewhere along the line, screwed
things up completely. The 787 grounding is costing Boeing, its partners, and
the American people - a _lot_ of money.

Discussing why this happens, how it happens, and what can be done about it, is
a very topical use of hacker news, in the first place: so why call for
silence-unless-authorized unless there is some desire to reduce the noise from
the rabble? The rabble aren't doing any harm; whereas the likelihood that the
management personnel of Boeing _are_ doing harm. Only by discussing this can
we gain any real insight into just how that can occur.

Clearly, the engineering is at fault: there is a fault. Is this management, is
it engineering, or is it just plain hard science involved - unless we discuss
this situation, openly and with a free will to apply to the investigation,
there is nothing much to be gained from the incident in a public setting.

I certainly hope they get the problem sorted. The means by which they do that,
is of high interest to me. I hope to fly on a 787 one day, and know that my
safety is a result of real solutions and not a faulty process being forced on
engineering by management under constraint of financial market performance
duress..

>>Here you have an engineer (me) saying: "We don't know enough. We need facts
before we can reach a conclusion. Please stop."

Here you have an entrepreneur saying: "We don't know enough. We need to know
more. No conclusions are being made, but the process of discussion sure is
interesting - it reveals a lot about human nature when billion-dollar budgets
- and human lives - are at risk. Please continue to discuss this issue as a
community."

~~~
robomartin
Sure. Whatever you said. It's OK.

I can't say much more than I already have because I don't have any real data
to work with. None. You and others are, of course, completely free to
visualize all manner of scenarios based on no direct evidence whatsoever. And,
again, that's OK. Perhaps a disclaimer might be nice?

I also look at this from another angle. As an American (US Citizen, whatever
sounds better to you) I am proud of the accomplishments of companies like
Boeing and, yes, SpaceX and others. These are the companies I point out to my
kids as examples of what smart people can achieve. Put bluntly, I don't like
it when I see a feeding frenzy that could destroy their reputation, cost jobs
and do other damage and said frenzy is based on not much more than pure
unfiltered bullshit.

Do they have an engineering problem?

Maybe.

How about a manufacturing problem?

Maybe.

How about a sourcing problem?

Maybe.

Testing?

Maybe.

Sabotage? Terrorism?

Maybe.

Negligent operators (airlines)?

Maybe.

I could go on.

All answers which originate from a lack of evidence can, at best, be "maybe's"
and at worst complete fabrications.

Now, you could take the time to go through the list I presented on this thread
and expand it with research into each of these areas and even expand my list.
That could be an interesting discussion of potential failure mode of such
systems. This CAN BE DONE without making categorical statements as to what
"actually" happened to the 787 battery pack. And, yes, that would be an
interesting and useful discussion. So, there you go. Take one item and fly
with it. Let's see where it leads.

~~~
primitur
>>Do they have an engineering problem?

>Maybe.

No! The answer is: YES THEY HAVE AN ENGINEERING PROBLEM.

The planes are not safe to fly!

~~~
hedgehog
It seems to me that it is very clear that there are multiple problems, that
the information necessary to identify the underlying causes is not available
to the general public, and that Boeing, partners, and USG are working on
getting this resolved. It seems interesting but not particularly useful to
speculate.

An interesting but useful line of questioning would be to look into industries
we know and our past companies for what happened and what lessons can be
learned in places where we have more complete information.

That said, the topic at hand :)

One question is whether the battery failures represent an unacceptable safety
risk. Without knowing anything about the technical specifics you can figure
the answer is yes: Boeing is the home town team and the FAA has every
political interest in keeping Boeing planes in the air. Still, their
overriding concern is safety and they've grounded the 787 in what must have
been an unpleasant choice but one viewed as necessary.

Another question is whether there is a management failure at Boeing.
Management is ultimately responsible for outcomes so whether this incident is
out of line with the industry norm is one reasonable way to answer that
question. In this case looking at data on whether grounding of a new model is
unusual would be reasonable. NTSB or FAA probably have this in a report
somewhere, my guess is it's rare (the only other similar thing I can think of
is the A380 wing cracks). So my guess is yes, by a reasonable standard there
was a management failure.

Those two things seem obvious and not particularly interesting to discuss.
Some things that are not obvious:

What's wrong with the batteries? robomartin's list of potential causes is long
and educational but (as he points out) incomplete. This is an interesting
problem for which we don't have enough information to reach any kind of strong
conclusion. Some really smart people who are also domain experts and who have
all of the data will sort this one out. Best read the news, at some point
there will be a weighty public report detailing exactly what went wrong.

What's wrong with Boeing? I'm sure this will be studied for decades to come, I
don't know and I'm pretty sure the author doesn't know. The idea that markets
start out favoring highly integrated designs and trend towards standardization
and modularity is well accepted and probably correct but at this point he's
just fitting recent events into that framework rather than finding ways to
test that hypothesis.

Whatever.

~~~
robomartin
I couldn't agree more with your post and your approach to discussing the
problem. Yes, unless we are talking about something like and attempt to
sabotage or worst, terrorism --both of which I would like to believe are
highly unlikely-- ultimately management and engineering have to look back and
see where the process dropped the ball. We are only human. We make mistakes.
As you said, actual data will bubble-up to the surface eventually. From an
engineering standpoint (and as a passenger!!!) I'd love to understand what
happened.

A while ago I enjoyed reading "The Machine That Changed the World":

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Machine-That-Changed-
World/dp/0060...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Machine-That-Changed-
World/dp/0060974176)

It was interesting to learn about the evolution of manufacturing and
management practices that made a huge impact on the automobile industry. Lots
of lessons from that book can be applied well outside that industry.

~~~
hedgehog
Thanks, that looks like a great recommendation. I spent some time at IMVU
(online service + software) a few years back and their processes were heavily
inspired by the Toyota Production System. The stuff they adopted seemed to
work really well so lean manufacturing has been interesting to me since.

