Boeing & the Critical Importance of Work Instructions

Boeing has been featured in much recent reporting due to issues surrounding the performance of their Max airplanes, and there’s much more to the story than just whether or not to book your next flight.

Boeing 737 Max planes crashed in 2018 and 2019. In early January 2024, a door plug flew off the side of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 plane because of several missing bolts. These airplane malfunctions opened questions about Boeing’s production line and quality assurance standards.

There is other good reporting on the history of Boeing’s executive strategy and its corporate politics; in this article we’re going to delve into the critical importance of work instructions in manufacturing operations.

We can gain insight about lean production standards and quality assurance protocols within the aerospace industry that are applicable to process control, parts handling, and product control in broader manufacturing.

Making Work Instructions Work For The Shop Floor

To get a better understanding of how Boeing suffered product failures, we have to take a closer look at where the products were assembled: the manufacturing shop floor. Here, work instructions are the key element guiding skilled workers into performing job actions that guarantee compliance with processes.

Ensuring Traceability In Production

Boeing has several US factories, and each one relies on external suppliers for specialized parts. It would be a simple solution to say that Boeing should centralize each facility so that planes are assembled end-to-end on site. This would definitely help with reducing defective components delivered by suppliers, but it just isn’t feasible.

Especially given the sheer scale of Boeing’s operations, it wouldn’t be efficient to mandate this kind of process change, and that’s assuming Boeing’s workforce has the skills, tools, and raw materials required to manufacture each component from scratch.

The better solution to reducing defect rates in components from suppliers is to invest in better traceability metrics.

For example, one former Boeing quality manager said workers assembling planes would sometimes try to install parts that had not been logged or inspected in an attempt to save time. In one case, a worker sent parts from a receiving area straight to the factory floor before a required inspection.

These acts of traceability non-compliance bypass necessary safety and quality checks, and threaten the integrity of the final product. In addition, it makes assembly just that much harder when parts aren’t properly accounted for because they can’t be accurately traced down when needed in the production line. This wastes time and money.

A simple way to enforce traceability is to use barcode scanners, RFID chips, or even standardized product codes. This information is logged into a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) or central database that can provide additional information like inspection and expiration dates, and sourcing and shipping details.

Authentications & Certifications

Authentications go hand-in-hand with traceability. You can’t let just anyone edit traceability logs without ensuring their seniority, the same way you wouldn’t hand an untrained and uncertified welder a hot torch.

Several current and former Boeing employees in South Carolina and in Washington State said mechanics building planes were sometimes allowed to sign off on their own work. Such “self-verification” removes a crucial layer of quality control, they said.

Building redundancies into manufacturing work processes is crucial for ultimate safety and quality compliance. Humans may make errors and machinery may unexpectedly fail. Redundancies help to catch those mistakes before any further damage is done.

Fortunately, this is another easy fix: within your manufacturing work instruction software, you can apply various levels of access to certain documents. For example, an employee who has not received specialized training for a task will be prohibited from that operation via the work instruction software. Meanwhile, an experienced (and certified) worker will have proper authentication via their employee ID card to access higher level tasks.

Clarity & Accuracy of Work Instructions

Manufacturing work instructions may be present on the shop floor, but they also need to be clear and accessible to workers.

One key issue in the FAA investigation into the Boeing incident in January is to determine what manufacturing documents were used to authorize the opening and closing of the door plug during work on the plane.

A recent conclusion by a panel of government and industry experts that found Boeing's procedures for ensuring safety were too complicated and changed too often.

There are many ways of using detailed work instructions in manufacturing, from visual to interactive instructions, lean instructions, etc. Regardless of the format, they need to be standardized throughout the facility so that each worker performing the same job does the same work every time to guarantee compliance.

For example, paper work instructions are awkward, static documents that aren’t easily updated or shared. For clarity and quality assurance, make sure your work instructions are digital and easily accessible throughout all areas of production.

You should also mandate certain key steps within the work instructions. You don’t want an employee to accidentally or purposefully skip an instruction when scanning the digital guidebook.

Establishing Safety Culture For Quality Control

Lean leadership methodologies like Six Sigma are successful tools for process control. These technical, statistical models can pinpoint areas of improvement and potential bottlenecks. However, Six Sigma–or any other lean framework–alone is just a method, not a whole safety culture.

Prioritizing Safety In Leadership

"The vast majority" of Boeing’s violations found by the FAA involved workers not following Boeing's approved procedures, Stan Deal, president of Boeing’s commercial plane division, said in a memo. Despite his words, this isn’t merely a matter of lazy or incapable workers.

There are significant “gaps” in Boeing’s safety culture, including a disconnect between management and employees, and fears among employees about retaliation for reporting safety concerns. Flaws in fuselages from suppliers were ignored to keep on production schedule, in one instance.

This disconnect between executives and frontline workers is concerning because the effects have compounded consequences for the end users of their product when it comes to safety.

Without a common understanding and dedication to quality control, internal processes won’t have any great effect on the manufacturing process. Moreover, the most effective way to build quality work instructions is to include workers’ own input, since they know the quirks and difficulties of specialized tasks that are unknown to management.

In Boeing’s case, executives’ re-dedication to safety standards is a welcome step in the right direction after this FAA conclusion.

Quality Over Speed In Training

As technology changes, workers need to be educated on best practices and SOPs.

One Boeing employee who conducted quality inspections in Washington State until last year said the company did not always provide new employees with sufficient training, sometimes leaving them to learn crucial skills from more experienced colleagues.

Tribal knowledge within the workforce is valuable, but when it is left up to individuals to gather it all, key information will inevitably fall between the cracks. When workers practice this acquired knowledge from scattered sources, their work will suffer from misremembered details or mistaken understandings.

Quality over speed must be established, and a commitment to providing mandatory training throughout the line is an appropriate response. Boeing said that since Jan. 5, employees had asked for more training and that it was working on meeting those needs, including by adding training on the factory floor.

This overall training and upskilling also helps establish a solid safety culture which will be the foundation for better quality control.

Reorganizing Supply Chain & Production Workflow

Finally, Boeing has committed to reorganizing their supply chain. This is perhaps the more complicated fix, and it will require effort to implement.

Boeing uses something called “shadow factories”, which are facilities at the end of the production line where workers address any final issues that are found throughout assembly, such as improper drilling component misalignments. This is theoretically where the missing door plug bolts would have been replaced in the January incident, if the mistake was identified.

The problem is that shadow factories don’t always have the tools or components needed at the end of the main production line. This means workers have to physically retrieve items from other areas of the factory or even separate facilities.

These protocols inherent to shadow factories are clearly not cohesive with lean production. It’s more cost-effective, quicker, less wasteful, and simply better to catch assembly errors along the way instead of attempting to both identify and fix them at the end of production.

Boeing’s response is to start moving the experienced workers from the 787 and 737 shadow factories to the main production lines:

“We are intent on shutting [shadow factories] down as we exit this year and liquidating that inventory, delivering those airplanes to our customers,” CFO Brian West said at a conference in March. “And the productivity benefit is enormous because you’re going to take some of our most highly skilled labor and point it away from rework and point it towards first-run production.”

In this move, production will become more lean and better controlled. Additionally, having experienced workers on the main area of production gives Boeing the opportunity to capture some of that valuable tribal knowledge and standardize it in digital work instructions for future runs.

Conclusion & Liftoff

As a global leader in the aerospace industry, Boeing serves as an example for both products and processes. Errors, mistakes, and failures are factors that are very much present in any area of manufacturing; continuous improvement is one of the central principles to lean production philosophies.

While Boeing’s prior manufacturing woes are serious, there are definitely steps in the right direction, both for the company’s bottom line and for the safety of frequent fliers everywhere. The manufacturing processes exposed at Boeing’s facilities provide insight into the importance of work instruction software regardless of the industry.