Management Planning - the Boeing Company

The Boeing Company designs, develops, manufactures, sells, services, and supports commercial jetliners, military aircraft, satellites, missile defense, human space flight, and launch systems and services worldwide. It operates in five segments: Commercial Airplanes, Boeing Military Aircraft, Network & Space Systems, Global Services & Support, and Boeing Capital. The Commercial Airplanes segment develops, produces, and markets commercial jet aircraft for various passenger and cargo requirements; and provides related support services to the commercial airline industry. This segment also offers aviation services support, aircraft modifications, spare parts, training, maintenance documents, and technical advice to commercial and government customers. The Boeing Military Aircraft segment researches, develops, produces, and modifies manned and unmanned military aircraft, and weapons systems for global strike, vertical lift, and autonomous systems, as well as mobility, surveillance, and engagement. The Network & Space Systems segment researches, develops, produces, and modifies strategic defense and intelligence systems, satellite systems, and space exploration products.

Boeing pursues Product Differentiation strategy in order to create competitive advantage over Airbus. Boeing differentiates its products by increasing number of seating capacity, engine capacity, innovating new winglet designs and by manufacturing wide range of products in respect to the change in market

Boeing’s faces these marketing risks. The marketing manager brought it to the airlines, who reviewed, among other things, its flight characteristics, range, cursing speed, interior, systems and operating costs the feedback to designers the airplanes to meet the best the requirements of customers is a difficult process. Airline bit difficult to design. Therefore, the configuration changes constantly.

The leadership style at Boeing is high structured, high consideration where the organization provides step by step guidance on how tasks are to be completed and it is highly considerate of the employee needs and wants. At Boeing honesty matters, the organization outlines initiatives that focuses on enabling the culture of openness and accountability to maintain an ethical workplace that will increase business performance. Their leadership is based on transformational leadership where the focus is on their ethical approach to doing things the correct way and allowing employees to be open about issues and concerns. This approach has become embedded in the ethical decision-making aspect of business, equipping managers

Airbus had a reputation for innovative design and technology. All Airbus planes employed “fly-by-wire” technology that substituted computerized control for mechanical linkages between the pilot and the aircraft’s control surfaces. This technology combined with a common cockpit design permitted “cross crew qualification” (CCQ) whereby pilots were certified to fly similar aircrafts, thus offering flexible scheduling in flight crews on various models, leading to better pilot utilization and lower training costs. These features helped explain why Airbus had received over half of the total large aircraft orders for the first time in 1999. However, despite the gains in market share, Airbus still did not have a product to compete with the monopoly of Boeing’s 747 in the VLA market.

Strategy #1 The aircraft market is extremely competitive, even though there are less than five major players globally. Between Boeing and Airbus, most of the market share for the next generation aircraft has already been solidified. For Bombardier to effectively gain orders it must make the aircraft are more appealing to purchasers in two major ways: cost and performance. In the final cost of an aircraft, a great deal of money is spent on research and development. Boeing has millions invested in new aircraft and wing design, and piggy-backs off its other divisions and aircraft offerings. Airbus receives a great deal of benefit from its govermnet contracts

Organizations are responsible for the legal, ethical, and social issues that affect each stakeholder within the company. These factors continually impact the planning process performed at each level of management. An organization that neglects to establish and monitor plans can become disorganized and ultimately lose control of practices performed throughout the corporation. A prime example of poor planning due to disregard of legal, ethical, and social issues were the executives employed at WorldCom.

Boeing adopts a very thorough, well planned out process to manage the project. The stages are defined clearly and tasks involved in each stage are carried out sequentially. The first stage of their approach is the project definition phase during which Boeing identified holes in the market not met by existing planes, assessed future airline needs, considered alternative plane configurations, explored feasibility of possible technologies and performed preliminary estimation of costs. During the market assessment, analysts gathered information regarding future needs of airlines by speaking directly to

Market Share Airbus will launch their new large, long distance plane A380 in 2006. This plane can be a dreadful competitive product to Boeing. If Boeing falls behind regarding innovations, fuel efficiency and other attributes of a long haul airliner, it will soon lose its market share. In order for Boeing to compete in the aviation industry, it is crucial to take on some risk and develop this new 7E7 project. This helps the company to fight against its competitors and recover from the slump in the industry.

Nevertheless, as Boeing gears up for its all-new 7E7 airliner, arch rival Airbus may already be putting 7E7 orders at risk by talking to airlines about a similar plane. Airbus is viewed a having advanced technologies coupled with a conglomerate backing and Boeing has not come up with any new innovative ideas in the last ten

Dominating the commercial aircraft market for decades, Boeing is considered to be the most highly competitive U.S aerospace industry. “U.S. firms manufacture a wide variety of products for civil and defense purposes and, in 2010, the value of aerospace industry shipments was estimated at $171 billion, of which civil aircraft and aircraft parts accounted for over half of all U.S. aerospace shipments. The U.S. aerospace industry exported nearly $78 billion in products in 2010, of which $67 billion (or 86% of total exports) were civil aircraft, engines, equipment, and parts” (Harrison, 2011). However, its position of influence has lessened in recent years. This is due to its main competitor, Airbus, who in recent years has made significant

The following analysis identifies the major strategic issues of Airbus and its industry, provides alternatives and a recommendation of the most optimal solution, and details a plan of implementation for the company.

THE BOEING COMPANY: STRATEGIC AUDIT I. CURRENT SITUATION A. Current Performance Boeing performance has been outstanding for the past few years. Their Return on investment rose from three percent to 6 percent from 1998 to 1999, but it did drop to five percent in 2000. In 1996 Airbus claimed 42% of the market share, while Boeing had 64%. Boeing is looking at falling below the 50% mark. Boeing's profits have been doing quite well. They have risen drastically in the past few years, which can be seen in the profitability ratios. Boeing is doing fine when it comes to profitability, even though they have dropped slightly since 1999.

With the company being in the public eye at all times the planners must determine where, when, and how the product will be used before they begin building, testing, and using the new technologies. Since Boeing has become such a large company it has had to continuously evaluating the way it does things to make sure that they are doing the right thing.

1.1 In developing the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, Boeing executive management’s initial decisions and project management strategies did not control the four major measurements of project success: time, budget, performance and client acceptance (Pinto, 2013, pp. 35,36). This report analyses the methodology and project management decisions that led to a project crisis and risk to Boeing’s reputation.