Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Like Amazon,
Boeing is delivering items around the clock to customers throughout the world.
Logistics — it plays a pivotal role in Boeing's operations,
and it is the main area of study for an industry and university
research consortium known as CELDi. "CELDi is the Center for Excellence in Logistics and Distribution."
"We have been looking for a project that we could work with
at the University of Missouri on. The C-17 came up with
a very compelling problem statement in terms of looking
at large-scale network optimization. "We do a lot of shipping around the world now.
We're global,
and we see the opportunities to do our shipping smarter
either by using different modes of transportation
and are co-locating parts together
and bring them all back at one time so that we can reduce the cost of
transportation."
"Nothing happens without logistics, you know, everything moves.
It has to move, or you don't get anything.
Just being able to put together a plan that has a
a degree of complexity that we don't think about a lot of times. Because stuff
just shows up. But the reality — to get from point A to point B
and have it timed right, in the right qualities and at right cost — is a huge problem."
"What we did was develop a program that they can use to
minimize a transportation costs and look at every option
whether it be placed in D.C., overseas or maybe
reroute some of their shipments and look at the effect that has
that they can make the best choice that minimizes cost."
"In some ways, these types of modeling simulation tools
are a little bit of a mindset shift for an organization like supply chain.
It's really thinking about how we do all of our processes, and how we can improve
all of our processes."
This partnership provides another benefit: A doorway into Boeing for
engineering talent.
"It's really leveraging our university relationships
to provide us with some leading edge technologies.
It also helps us to provide pipeline to bring new talent into Boeing, which is
all part of that innovation and growth strategy."
"One of the reasons I went into industrial engineering was the
large-scale network optimization problems, and for a
I guess, an industrial engineer, that sort of problem is heaven for me.
What excites me, is it's all, you know, they're so many moving parts; there's
so many constraints. There's so many
things that have to be optimized. You have to pull all this data together,
and what looks like huge, Excel spreadsheets, you can
solve that, break it down, analyze it, and save companies
millions of dollars."