As an Airbus trainee I had the opportunity to work for the
Procurement Quality International (PQI) section of Central
Airbus Entity. This subsection of Procurement mainly deals with quality issues.
To that purpose, internal work must be done with the Airbus Quality Responsible
as well as external work with the Supplier Quality Responsible.
This training period gave me the chance to understand how
quality control is conducted in the aerospace industry. In addition to this
overview, I get a real insight of the aerospace OEMs and supplier needs with
regard to quality issues. I also get a deep knowledge of ICT tools deployment
in a large company.
I was mainly in charge of the relationships with suppliers
concerning the use of a collaborative platform. To that regard, I did some
administrative work, meaning that I assured full completion of the registration
process by the supplier. I also produce some communication documents, which
were helping suppliers to understand the outputs and inputs of the
collaborative platform. It was also needed to give some technical guidance
through mail or phone calls. As communication was also conducted among Airbus
employees, I was in charge of producing communication documents for the
internal usage.
Related to the registration process some reporting was done
especially during the PQI meetings. As a matter of fact, some key quality
indicators were provided. They allow the measuring of the adoption level of the
collaborative platform by the suppliers. These indicators also help the team to
take corrective actions or to enhance the best actions.
All the work described above allows the cleaning up of the
suppliers' repository database used by the Airbus employees. I also take part
into the collaborative work done by one Airbus responsible with the European
Aerospace Quality Group.
With regard to technical issues, I worked in collaboration
with the support staff of the collaborative platform. I was in charge of
explaining the difficulties encountered by the external and internal users of
the platform. To that purpose written reports explained the users needs and
even propose other solutions.
In addition to the collaborative work done with the support
staff, we also had to coordinate our efforts with the other departments. The
holding of different meetings ensured that we were following the same road.
Considering the main tasks conducted during my training
period, I've decided to write over the link between the transformation of the
supplier role and the use of Information and Communication Technologies.
Throughout this paper we try to demonstrate the shift in the roles of suppliers
and how the tools provided by the Information and Communication Technologies
(ICTs) enhance the collaboration in the aerospace and automotive industry.
Considering the similarities between the automotive and aerospace supply chain,
we decided to illustrate theory with vivid examples taken from both industries.
In order to some useful benchmarking, we also decided to focus on the Boeing
practice. We most particularly examine the e-tools, which are used by the
Airbus competitor.
The main goal of this paper is to convince the readers that
concepts such as supply chain management and supplier relationship management
are not useless theories served by costly and sophisticated e-tools. We try to
demonstrate that the e-tools available can create value when implemented in the
best manner.
Considering the new face of competition, the relationship
with suppliers is no longer the same indeed. We would like to prove that the
combination of the top management vision and the use of the most appropriate
e-tools alleviate the supplier relationship to a real and highly valuable
collaboration. We even conclude that firms, which can consider themselves as
networks are adopting the "extended enterprise" business model.
We begin to introduce the discussion by explaining how supply
chain management goes beyond production and logistics functions. To that
purpose, we try to underline how supply chain management leads to a value chain
approach. Then, we examine how Suppliers Relationship Management e- tools
enabled a better collaboration with the best suppliers.
The second part of this paper focus on the two main models of
e-commerce exchanges, which are used in both automotive and aerospace industry.
In order to do that, we detail the structure and functionalities of both
exchanges. Then, we decided to explain the best practices in the case of
e-commerce exchanges adoption and implementation.
As quality is a key issue for both OEMs and suppliers in the
aerospace industry, we decided to explain the industry approach of these issues
and and its link with ICTs.
