Book Excerpts – Case Study 9 – Boeing 787

I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in February (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . Chapters 6 through 17 cover 12 attributes of what I call the elite. Each also has a case study. Here is the excerpts from case study, the Boeing 787 program and the HCL role in it for Chapter 9 which focused on Global Technology Reach. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.

You are driving north of Seattle and hear a giant Boeing 747 approaching. Then you do a double take. This one does not have the distinctive hump of a 747. The hump actually extends across most of the length of the plane. It is a Dreamlifter, a specially modified 747 with a massive cargo capacity of 65,000 cubic feet and takeoff weight of up to 800,000 pounds.

The Dreamlifter is the primary means of transporting major portions of the new Boeing 787 from suppliers in Italy, Japan, and many other countries to the final assembly site in Everett, WA. This has allowed Boeing to reduce delivery times to as little as one day from as many as 30 days it would normally take via sea and ground transport. This is one of countless innovations Boeing implemented around the manufacturing of the 787—branded the Dreamliner.

The involvement of so many suppliers across the globe has been criticized, especially given the repeated delays and related increased costs on the 787 program. The reality is Boeing’s main competitor Airbus had already shown that large sections of a plane could be made in four countries—Britain, France, Germany, and Spain—and then assembled in France or Germany.

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The 787 plane itself has many innovative features, and the savings expected from a streamlined supply chain allowed Boeing to price aggressively. That made the 787 the fastest selling airliner ever designed. By 2007 Boeing had announced firm orders for 544 airplanes from 44 airlines.²² While the delays since have led to several canceled orders, as of June 2011 Boeing had orders for 850 planes and says it is sold out through the end of the decade.

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The use of composite materials in the fuselage and the wings, the sweptback aerodynamic wings, and the more efficient engines are expected to combine to deliver 20 percent better fuel performance than a similar sized 767 of today. The plane promises flight ranges of up to 8,500 nautical miles, unusual for a mid-sized jet but critical as passengers increasingly demand non-stops across the globe.

And passengers will enjoy all kinds of improvements, such as:

· The LEDs allow the crew to adjust the lighting to match different phases of the flight. The light is fairly standard during boarding and while cruising. During meals it is adjusted to warmer tones. Once you’re done eating and want to tilt the seat back and relax, the cabin can be bathed in a relaxing lavender hue. When it’s time to sleep, the lights are turned way down.²³

· The cabin will feel less dry (humidity twice as high as on current planes), because the 787 cooling system will be driven by electricity. An electrical system makes it easier to humidify the cabin air because it’s not starting with the hot, dry air from the jet engines common in most planes.²⁴

· The superior strength of the composite fuselage will allow the passenger cabin to withstand higher pressurization at an altitude of 6,000 feet instead of the usual 8,000 feet. Passenger comfort is shown to increase significantly at lower cabin altitude pressure.²⁵

· An active gust alleviation system will improve ride quality during turbulence.

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A major innovation passengers will not see but will benefit from is Boeing’s use of HCL Technologies to provide software engineering services for the 787 program. Since HCL had already been involved with a number of its tier-one suppliers like Rockwell Collins, GE Aviation, and others both for hardware systems and software development, it offered a unique opportunity of synergy across the fragmented supply chain. HCL was designated the preferred software services company for the entire 787 program.

HCL has long had an R&D bent. It developed the first indigenous microcomputer in India in 1978 (the same time as Apple did) and developed the indigenous relational database at the same time as its global IT peers. HCL also says it developed its multiprocessing UNIX-based OS kernel in the late 1980s, a few years ahead of Sun and HP, which of course, commercialized it far more successfully.

Says Sandeep Kishore, Executive Vice President for the Engineering and R&D Services unit at HCL Technologies, “We have done over 750 projects in the aerospace industry covering avionics, engineering design, and extensive testing. We have been involved in all major commercial aerospace programs across the globe in the past decade. Under this umbrella agreement with the Boeing Company, HCL worked as the engineering services partner of choice with multiple sub-tier companies on the 787 program.” HCL’s services were utilized by these airborne systems suppliers across all the major design elements of the 787 such as common core systems, open systems architecture, and e-enabled architecture.

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CEO Jim McNerney summarizes: “While we clearly stumbled on the execution, we remain steadfastly confident in the innovative achievements of the airplane and the benefits it will bring to our customers.”²⁶

When passengers breathe the cleanest air of any airplane ever built (the air will have the same microbial content of outside air with its filters with an efficiency of 99.97 percent) and glance out of their 18 5-inch tall 787 windows, the largest on any commercial plane, and which have electronically adjustable electrochromic dimmers, the production delays will be a memory from the past.²⁷

And Boeing has learned plenty about how to manage a globally distributed technology supply chain.

Photo Credit: The shot of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner ZA001 was taken at Oshkosh 2011 in Conoco Phillips Square by Ken Mist.  This was the 787's first North American public display. Ken is an avid amateur aviation photographer living in Brampton Ontario Canada.