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Aviation History
2002
2002 - 0085.PDF
Cover story "They've had some demanding milestones and they are on track," says Spanish MI team member and former deputy CASA chairman Carlos Navarro. "There is not so much pressure on short-term results, which would in the long term destroy the real integration." While divisional MI teams are, at the moment, set to stay in place for some time, the top EADS MI team will wind down in March, months earlier than originally planned. "You cannot run people too long," says Loewenstein. "People must learn how to live. You get the processes running, and then you have to get out. Things are going well - reasonably well in all areas, very well in some areas. With regard to value creation, we discovered that initially it is going better than expected. With regard to human resources, the only difficulty we have is managing the different tax, social security and labour laws in all EADS home countries." The emphasis from the start had to be on building EADS as an entirely new organisation with no room for the "1 swal low you, you swallow me" mentality typi cal of US mergers. "The culture of how to handle communications, how to come to a decision - which was linked to company procedures - was something we had to reinvent," says Stegkemper. Corporate culture "We believe that corporate cultures are more dominant in our day-to-day work than national cultures. So finding the right approach to a new issue like merger inte gration was crucial to our success," he con tinues. "If our approach to merger integra tion had been perceived as prototypical Dasa, CASA or Aerospatiale Matra, we would have faced right from the start an emotional 'I don't like that'. Therefore, we have tried to find a common way which all people can agree to and is beneficial." English is the corporate language, but within its confines, certain words have become part of an EADS lexicon and oth ers banned from use because of their con notation in the other languages. "Com promise", for instance, is frowned upon because, to the native French speaker, it connotes giving up or in. Instead, the favoured term for a mutually agreed answer is "solution". A DCS source attributes a key initial dis connection between the French and Germans to a difference in problem-solving techniques: "The Germans will start devel oping a process to come to a solution. The French will think of a solution and then how to realise it. Now that we are all start ing to realise this difference, it is our chance to make use of both approaches. It sounds easier than it is, but as we move ahead, I would say we are all becoming more French or more German." It has been at EADS' upper levels of management that the least acceptance has been found, according to EADS sources. Elsewhere, the workforce was THE DIVISIONAL VIEW: AIRBUS Evolution - not revolution They say that every cloud has a silver lining, and for Airbus, the downturn in the commercial avi ation industry is proving to have its upside as the company con tinues to integrate on two fronts - into the single integrated Airbus company and as part of EADS. "Difficult times are giving us the opportunity to change things which it couldn't change before, or speed up things where you couldn't have the right speed before," says Gustav Humbert, Airbus's chief operating officer and EADS executive committee member. Adds Bill Black, Airbus senior vice president of quality and integration: "Ironically, with the reduction of orders, we have actually increased capacity" to carry out integration projects. Integration reflected "evolu tion - not revolution," say Airbus executives, who also describe the two integrations under way as "a parallel approach". Both processes are unalterably linked. For instance, Black over sees both integrations for the aircraft manufacturer. Most activities focus, however, on internal Airbus integration. "We have a big organisation, with several hundreds of single pro jects and each has a milestone and a timescale with concrete costs and concrete savings," Humbert says. Airbus's integration will build on existing European centres of competence: wings in the UK, the cockpit in France, the fuse lage in Germany and the hori zontal stabiliser in Spain. These elements are key to focusing integration in purchasing, research and development (R&D) and central functions. Airbus's purchasing power is expected to be the single strongest contributor to the overall EADS value generation scheme. Abolishing duplications in R&D is crucial as Airbus launches its largest ever devel opment projects, on the A380 ultra-large aircraft and the A400M airlifter. Already Airbus operates more efficiently than before inte gration last summer because there is no longer any room for gamesmanship between com peting partners, Humbert sug gests. Before integration, Humbert had first-hand knowl edge of the psychology at work in his role as head of Airbus's German partner Dasa Airbus. "As a German chief executive, I knew very well the cost struc ture, the unit cost of a part in my plant. I didn't know what it was in the UK or France or Spain because they were some how competitors. We were sit ting there and dealing prices with Airbus Industrie, and if you deal with someone else's prices, you don't tell them what your cost is. It was sort of a poker game - but that's finished." "So now, for the first time," he says, "we know the real costs, and we can really allocate the work where we have the best cost structure." A key to that success is an internal bench marking programme under way that aims to pinpoint and share existing best practices through out the company. "Sharing best practice is easy to say, difficult to do," says Black. "There's a lot of personal feeling involved. It's easy to say work together. At the beginning, everyone believes their way is the only way. The first step is to open the doors which have been closed, and then open the minds - which is genuinely challenging." Now, however, Black says, "we're seeing genuine exploitation of best practice. Most people are now open to thinking about new ways of working." External benchmarking is next. As benchmarking with rival Boeing on a final assembly line will be difficult "because we won't give them our details and they won't give us theirs", Humbert believes that "insight from comparable mass produc tion industries such as the auto motive business can be valu able." Two new plant managers have been recruited from the auto world, Humbert says, in part to bring in "challenging ideas because we cannot be challenged by the market". Part of any reorganisation is determining who will fit which slot - in Airbus' case, no small feat considering the number of top-level players who were vying for the top 50 executive roles as well as the high sensitivities at play. An outside consultant was involved, to provide a filter against filling the positions with "people who might fit from the passports and from personal relationships", Humbert says, adding that decisions were "logical but also brutally taken. It's a huge task. It's not easy if you are 50 years old, and were the head of a big entity before, and you have to apply for a new job. But we did it, and every body had to do it for the top 50 positions." www.flightinternational.com FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL 8-14 JANUARY 2002 31
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