The vital link

摘要

There is still confusion about what the term "supply chain" means in practice and this underlines the most common problem with it. The key word is "chain", you have to consider the whole process end to end to get the best results and this is actually quite difficult. This is hampered by defensiveness within the aviation industry about learning from other industries, such as the automotive sector. While there are lots of important differences between aerospace and automotive -the two biggest being variability of demand and components with a single source - there are still things that our sector can learn from and adapt. Adapt not adopt is the key. The second major difficulty is often organisational; the supply chain is broken up across a number of departments, each with their own budget as well as individual KPIs and targets. These can be counterproductive as one part of the organisation can be driven to do something which is to the detriment of the rest of the chain.