2005 C.I.P.A. Winners

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Bombardier Inc.

Transforming Aircraft Manufacturing Processes

Bombardier Inc., a global corporation based in Dorval, Quebec, is a world-leading manufacturer of innovative transportation solutions, from regional aircraft and business jets to rail transportation equipment. Its revenue for fiscal 2005 was $15.8 billion US.

While Bombardier was founded in 1942, the Aerospace Group was created in 1987 with the acquisition of Canadair. It employs 26,000 employees worldwide worldwide.

Challenge

Bombardier Aerospace has more than 20 manufacturing sites globally, including four design and production centres in Montreal, Toronto, Kansas and Belfast, Northern Ireland. All these sites operate with their own methods and systems. They need to be integrated.

Bombardier has undertaken a massive, 10-year global initiative to transform the way it builds aircraft. Its challenge is to replace the aging and disparate systems that serve its global facilities with a single enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Objectives

The objectives of Bombardier's 10-year project are

• Facilitate and promote worldwide integration and collaboration among the various manufacturing departments and sites of Bombardier Aerospace and to extend this capability into communication with suppliers, external partners and customers;
• Liberate employees from cumbersome and paper-intensive processes and provide them with efficient tools;
• Deliver savings of $1.2 billion over 10 years and enable the transformation that will take Bombardier to a new plateau of efficiency and effectiveness.

Solution

The 10-year initiative began at the Montreal manufacturing site with the implementation of an ERP system to integrates all facets of the business, including planning, manufacturing, sales and marketing. That project, completed at the end of 2003, was known as BMIS, or Bombardier Manufacturing Information System. It involved a team of 400 people, 80 of whom were from the business, to deliver a complete solution. It took 24 months to complete, cost $85 million and reached 3,000 users.

The BMIS project was rated by SAP as one of the most complex and technically challenging in North America. Success depended on excellent sponsorship, strong change management, exemplary project management and strategic relationships with key partners.

The change-management team supported the project sponsor to promote the involvement of all business departments and to ensure the vision was clearly articulated. The team introduced multi-media communication and computer-based training to overcome the challenges of reaching a large audience. Value management processes were implemented to ensure delivery of results.

The project was delivered on budget and on schedule. Following on this successful pilot, subsequent rollouts have begun.

Innovative use of technology

The Engineering Workbench module of SAP was used to create a modern and highly efficient tool to manage complex bills of material and multi-media work instructions.

The Montreal team developed a printing and document management solution to coordinate the collation of documents, embedding of diagrams, pagination and revision control to the exacting aerospace standards required. It reduced by 50 per cent the time taken by the previous method. The effort involved in the preparation of aircraft delivery documentation has been reduced by 120 hours for each aircraft, or 30,000 hours a year. Replacement of the paper-based quality-management process by an online process has reduced costs and freed 4,500 person-days a year to be reinvested into product quality improvements

The introduction of secure portal technology has enabled a high degree of integration and collaboration. The vendor portal, by providing two-way exchange of information, is eliminating paper-based purchase orders and substantially reducing the effort involved in communicating with vendors.

Employees in Manufacturing Engineering Procurement and Production Supervision are reporting that the access to information and reduced clerical activity is leading to better decision-making and more time to spend with their teams and increased job satisfaction.

Bombardier recognizes that change management is key to its success and has engaged Cefrio and HEC Montreal to periodically review progress and provide lessons-learned analysis of the pilot project. This innovative approach is being used to target improvements in future deployments.

Trevor Anderson, vice president, BTS strategic planning and manager of the BMIS project, says: "BMIS represented a huge management challenge for Bombardier Aerospace. To transform the way we do business with a view to become more efficient and competitive has required Bombardier to innovate on its management practices and to count on the competence, professionalism and the creativity of its staff and key partners to make this huge project a success."

A 2005 CIPA Winner!

For its exceptional application of information technology to solve real-world business problems, Bombardier Aerospace has been awarded a 2005 CIPA Silver Award of Excellence in the Organizational Transformation, For Profit category.

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