| > " the car makers have learned it but Boeing didn't" Worked in automotive before (albeit briefly), I don't think the car makers have learned it at all. While I was there I saw GM, Chrysler, Ford, and a couple foreign (i.e., no US presence) makers shop constantly for the lowest bidder on everything, similar to the Boeing story here. And like the Boeing story, these projects quickly became clusterfucks. As a supplier ourselves we saw the least of it - I'd hate to be the guy at GM handling projects like this. My first week there I had to rescue a project from the brink of a multi-million dollar fine. There was a critical injection-molded plastic component in the product, but we were too cheap to pay the local provider (that we'd been with for the last couple decades) to cut the mold, and instead contracted it out to a Chinese shop an ocean away and half the price. Well, said shop was late delivering, and then the mold got held up in customs. Then management tried to squeeze a deal on the plastic provider, who turned out to be late, also. At the end of the day the company had to airlift a few container-fulls of product from Canada to South Korea. The contractual fine was worse than that cost... and I'm pretty sure we wiped away any savings a few times over with this whole debacle. Too much outsourcing, too far away from home, with no ability to keep an eye on things. |