[josefx]

> What was the problematic outsourcing decision here?

Buying from an untrusted source without any verification of your own in place.

> Buying your titanium from a titanium supplier?

For all we know they bought it on wish.com.

> Is Spirit supposed to be refine and foundry all their own metal alloys?

Random sampling of materials to determine if the delivery is fit for purpose should be the absolute minimum.

[constantcrying]

But the problem isn't outsourcing, it is failed incoming inspection.

[mrguyorama]

Spirit itself is an "outsourcing" from Boeing's point of view. They spun it off so they could put more aggressive downwards pressure on labor price and then play dumb when it had the obvious and well understood outcomes like "buying underspecced materials to save money" and "workers don't do all the work they should, to save money" and "having different systems to control work so you can massage the official one, to save money by doing less work"

[e44858]

Sounds like they outsourced the inspection too.

[Beijinger]

"For all we know they bought it on wish.com."

Source?

[2k3r11s]

For your future reference, the colloquial English expression "For all we know" implies that a humorous exaggeration follows.

[caminante]

That's the point.

The parent is blaming quality control steps of outsourced materials at Boeing (not third party).

"Outsourcing = bad" is missing the point.

[pfdietz]

If sufficiently intense oversight is needed at the boundary then outsourcing becomes uneconomical. This is something SpaceX found (and also because external sources were often slow and expensive.)

[everforward]

Are you sure that applies to commodities with extremely high capital costs like mining and refining ore?

It sort of makes sense to me with SpaceX. They’re presumably buying fairly boutique parts that likely already require custom manufacturing, so someone is spending capital either way. I can see how it might make sense for them to build a custom manufacturing line instead of paying someone else.

That seems odd for commodities like titanium, though. Even if Boeing were to do it themselves, that oversight process is already a subset of the mining and refining process. They’re going to have to build out their QA lab either way.

[pfdietz]

The weasel word "sufficiently" was doing the heavy lifting.

[caminante]

> If sufficiently intense oversight is needed at the boundary then outsourcing becomes uneconomical.

1. That doesn't make outsourcing "bad" before the cost benefit analysis. Commenters above are broadly blaming outsourcing.

2. As a thought experiment, specialized suppliers could be able to manage risks and costs cheaper due to absolute advantages. That's the whole point of outsourcing.

3. Mitigating the consequential and indirect damages to Boeing from this identity crisis could easily (my SWAG) justify hundreds of millions of dollars (another SWAG) in spend on better quality control audits.

[pfannkuchen]

Other countries in some cases seem to have much less enforcement of anti fraud. In the US if a company is knowingly selling fraudulent material, I’m guessing they can get in legal trouble for fraud? Does that happen in e.g. China?

[caminante]

If it does, it does. If it doesn't, it doesn't.

How is your question relevant?

[therealpygon]

That is an interesting point of view, however, needing to distrust and expect fraud from every outsource agency sounds exactly like their point, which was not the elementary “outsource = bad” that you make it out to be.

[caminante]

No.

The parent said that the quality control should be on the supplier, not Boeing. This is instead of a joint problem with Boeing validating.

Look at the repercussions.

Boeing gambled on shaving procurement oversight and lost.