BoostAeroSpace had invited to the 6th BoostAeroSpace Customer Group on October 18th 2018, this time to Paris. Participants who had already arrived the evening before took the opportunity for a joint dinner not too far from La Tour Eiffel.
In the morning of October 18th 2018, Anne CARRERE from BoostAeroSpace (BAS) welcomed about 45 participants, mostly customer representatives, mainly from France, Germany and Italy, but also solution providers. The represented customer companies included Airbus, STELIA, Safran, Thales, Dassault, LIEBHERR, DAHER, Latécoère, Leonardo, MBDA and Zodiac.
BoostAeroSpace President Patrick FANGET presented BoostAeroSpace at a glance, with its mission to implement collaborative and secured tools for the global European Aerospace Supply Chain through Service Providers. He pointed out that about 2.000 suppliers are part of the community, thereof about 200 M2M. He also shared about the 2018 activities of BoostAeroSpace, which had two main focus areas:
- Extend in horizontal (buyside) and vertical (sellside – digital continuity)
- Support SupplyOn on growing the buyside community of currently 18 buyside companies
A usage status for the different products which are under BoostAeroSpace governance, among them SupplyOn AirSupply, was given. He also pointed out that BoostAeroSpace should not be seen as French company, but at least as a European company, as the suppliers are European, with many of them in France, Germany and the UK. He made clear that digital continuity matters here, to further extend the network.
Latécoère and Sonaca joining the BoostAeroSpace Community
Two new community members have recently joined BoostAeroSpace, Latécoère as French Tier1 and Sonaca as Belgium Tier 1, who are both about to start AirSupply buyside projects.
José SORIANO from Latécoère, AirSupply project lead, gave a short presentation about Latécoère’s proud history of more than 101 years, their product portfolio including tubes and doors and their more than 4,400 employees.
AirSupply Feature Management based on an agile release train explained
Anne CARRERE explained the feature management process for AirSupply , based on an agile way of working. This process which was launched the year before, has proven to be very successful: In four so-called “Program Increments” (PIs) per year, lasting 12 weeks each and consisting of sprints of 3 weeks each, an agile release train has been implemented, allowing for better time to market. The benefits include continuous feed of change requests, with enough time to analyze, and scoring for the prioritization of topics, in the last week of each PI.
The Leonardo POEMA success story for indirect procurement suppliers
Gioacchino PUCCIA presented how AirSupply customer Leonardo managed to deploy more than 2,000 e-mail access suppliers on AirSupply, by an intelligent split between direct material suppliers being deployed in Connect mode, and indirect procurement suppliers, being deployed as e-mail access suppliers. He pointed out the necessity of good e-mail addresses as necessity for project success. Leonardo also uses the SupplyOn document management to provide attachments related to e.g. spot orders.
Airbus Project on quality solutions – “The world has changed”
Part of the highlights of the event were for sure the insights which Deborah CARDER from Airbus gave into the Airbus Initiative to increase E2E quality in the supply chain, with the project “SC4QT” (Supply Chain for Quality Tools”). It targets for more preventive and systematic use of quality methods and tools, increased anticipation of upcoming quality topics, upstream focus on manufacturability and design, better consideration of customer expectations, and systematic feedback loops to accelerate problem fix and Lessons Learned. Integral part of the related Airbus strategy is to use AirSupply as single entry point for Supply Chain Collaboration with suppliers. The SC4QT project vision is to optimize information flow, linked to quality processes, between Airbus and suppliers.
The clear goal is to prevent non-quality for the supply chain through a robust management system and to reduce the impact of non-quality, by shorter lead times and less manual tasks and reduced criticality of events. The SC4QT project was launched in June 2018 and builds on supplier collaboration quality processes like SupplyOn Project management (APQP), AirSupply Concession and SupplyOn 8D / 9S (Problem Solver). Up to 1,200 suppliers will be affected. First pilots from solution are expected in early 2019.
The Airbus AirSupply P2P Success Story: Benefits through touchless invoice booking with the integrated ordering and invoicing solution AirSupply P2P
Deborah Carder presented a status update on the Airbus AirSupply Purchase-to-Pay project, as integrated ordering and invoicing digital solution, for direct ordering suppliers. The solution saves time spent on invoices, through touchless invoice booking. It builds upon reliable PO data, to eradicate upstream issues. Celonis was an important enabler as data mining tool. Another success factor were the multi-functional teams (procurement + finance + Information Management). A retiring b-process solution had to be replaced, with all the related dependencies and complexity drivers of a migration project. After this has been accomplished, the focus is now on bringing former paper invoice suppliers to P2P. This solution is not only in use for now more than 1,000 Airbus direct materials suppliers and with more than 750,000 invoices, but also for SupplyOn automotive customers like Bosch and Siemens. Suppliers have the choice between different channels, with M2M suppliers accounting for more than half of the invoice volume, followed by CSV Upload, PDF Upload and suppliers creating the invoice via the AirSupply user interface, as connect or as e-mail access suppliers.
In contrast to other solutions focusing only on digitalization of former paper invoices, Airbus took a holistic approach with a high autobooking rate for touchless invoicing which has been accomplished, enabled by top management sponsorship, multi-functional teams, allocating sufficient resources for supplier deployment and direct customer contact towards suppliers in parallel to SupplyOn deployment setup. Main challenges were reliable contact data, lead time of suppliers to implement their channels, process issues which had to be eradicated in parallel to tool deployment, as well as the B-Process retirement deadline. The Benefits at the end of journey include
- on-time supplier payment improved due to autobooking
- reduced workload for customers & suppliers to avoid invoicing issues and E2E visibility in 1 tool for customers and suppliers from PO publish, GR & invoice
BoostAeroSpace welcomed this good news also for other BAS customers, as the solution is available, and many relevant suppliers are already deployed.
New products and services from BoostAeroSpace
Before lunch started, BoostAeroSpace service provider Infotel demonstrated in a short demo how smaller suppliers could in the future easily up- und download data from AirSupply, with some pre-validations, into their own ERP, via a new BoostAeroSpace tool. Also the related price model was explained. Furthermore, a new service was presented, which is a BoostAeroSpace offer for a security assessment for SMEs, also with the related price model.
The voice of suppliers matters
Xavier MOULIGNEAU from LIEBHERR Toulouse took the opportunity to be the “voice of suppliers”: He pointed out that SMEs are not heard enough, e.g. when they do the dispatch advise / ASN implementation or if different customers do not use the same field for the same information, e.g. for topics like the specification index. In response to the given need for further ASN deployment support, Arvid HOLZWARTH from SupplyOn has offered to extend an already existing format for a yearly Dispatch Advise Deployment Best Practices Workshop from Airbus to also other community members, involving also the needs of the suppliers, for exchange of best practices. According to BoostAeroSpace this will be further pursued.
Insights what is new in AirSupply
Last but not least, Axel SANDVOSS from SupplyOn presented some recent improvements done in AirSupply, as part of the last three PIs: A highlight here the possibility to include attachments to AirSupply purchase orders for the suppliers, and also the possibility for DA suppliers to include attachments as part of the Despatch advice messages towards customer’s backends, which then can be directly imported into the customer’s ERP. He also shared a vision how the future AirSupply’s user interface could look like – with a mockup with flexible widgets, allowing easy integration of different functionalities under the umbrella of AirSupply.
New analytics capabilities from SupplyOn – Three standard dashboards for free, per customer
Furthermore, Axel SANDVOSS demonstrated the possibilities of SupplyOn’s analytics solution to visualize, analyze and drill down raw data in visual dashboards, with quite some standard dashboards already being available, three of such standard dashboards being available without additional cost for existing AirSupply customers. This analytics tool is with different dashboards already in use at some Aerospace customers.
A big “Thank you” to Anne CARRERE – and the community journey continues
Last but not least, BoostAeroSpace with Anne CARRERE as driving force for this event closed this year’s Customer Group Meeting and has earned a big “Thank you” from all the participants – who already look forward to what’s coming next from BoostAeroSpace and its service providers.
