Boeing strikes conciliatory tone with suppliers amid 737 MAX crisis
Boeing executives extended an olive branch to the company's strained supply chain this week to help them deal with the fallout of the latest 737 MAX crisis, but those firms are taking a wait-and-see attitude after years of dealing with the planemaker's hard-line approach.
The aerospace giant's shift in tone was underlined by a speech on Wednesday by Ihssane Mounir, Boeing's vice president of supply chain and fabrication, at an aerospace conference outside Seattle. «We build the airplane together. There's no you and us. It's just us,» he said.
Mounir's remarks — and those of Boeing's head of supplier quality on Tuesday — were the first public addresses by Boeing to its base of more than 1,100 suppliers in the Pacific Northwest region after a Jan. 5 mid-air blowout on a Boeing 737 MAX 9 that has rocked the aerospace industry.
Multiple suppliers who spoke to Reuters on the condition of anonymity said Mounir's comments marked a shift in tone from Boeing's previous strategy for driving supply-chain efficiency and cost-reduction, exemplified by the company's notorious «Partnering for Success» initiative in the 2010s.
The initiative, which cut supply-chain costs by 15%, was unpopular with suppliers who said Boeing had profited on the backs of a squeezed industrial base. The planemaker has said in the past that the program was necessary to assure the company's long-term competitive advantage.
One supplier said this week that they were «cautiously optimistic,»
