It isn’t always comfortable, but data analytics is helping Boeing reach new heights.
Boeing CIO Ted Colbert is something of an evangelist for the power of data analytics. He recently spoke with McKinsey’s Aamer Baig about how he has been spreading the word within Boeing, and why even companies overflowing with analytical talent sometimes have to work hard to reap its full rewards.
The Quarterly: Does a company like Boeing, renowned for its engineering prowess, have a head start when it comes to harnessing the power of digital analytics?
Ted Colbert: To some extent, yes. We have a company full of engineers, mathematicians, scientists, and statisticians who achieve amazing things. And data analytics is certainly not a new field to the company. When I first started to raise its growing importance, we probably had about 800 people we could classify as data scientists, which was a great start. But when we started to ask how data driven our decisions were, whether we really used the insights we had to drive productivity and the capabilities of the company, we quickly discovered there was much more we could be doing.
For example, we’d been using data-science capabilities to improve maintenance decisions for a decade. But we hadn’t been pulling data from the factory floor to understand how well Boeing’s production system was working. Take the 787. I visited our factory in Everett [Washington] at a time when we were under pressure to improve productivity. I wanted to better understand how the mechanics worked. I was told, quite reasonably, that they followed processes that are documented in a procedures manual, and everything anyone did was logged in a system, as required for certification. We took a more concerted effort to find improvements for factory-floor disruption, such as mechanics spending a quarter of their time identifying parts, plans, and tools to start their jobs.
At first, many people told me there was nothing new in what I was saying about data analytics. “We already do that,” was the common response. It’s only when you can produce these kind of proof points in areas that matter that the light comes on for people—when they are under pressure to drive margins, for example, but realize that the playbook they’ve been using for years just doesn’t deliver anymore. It changes the mind-set. People come to understand that there is a ton of richness trapped below all the capability that already exists in the company.
Getting to that understanding isn’t always a comfortable journey. For example, we wove together about 13 systems to show how much inventory was sitting in our systems that didn’t have a demand pull. In a company our size, you might expect it to be worth tens of millions of dollars. But we found it added up to hundreds of millions of dollars. That made a few people very uneasy, and their first instinct was to dispute the data. Let’s face it, when you highlight this kind of stuff, you are highlighting the need for cultural change. But Boeing is a 100-year-old company, and I don’t see my role as one of simply reinforcing how great it is. Rather, it’s to figure out where truth lies in data that will help us flourish for the next 100 years.
The Quarterly: How do you move from demonstrating data analytics’ power in a handful of projects, to embedding it across a company the size of Boeing?
Ted Colbert: Demand for data-analytics resources mushrooms as you demonstrate its value. At one time, we had over 100 data-analytics projects in the queue related to improving productivity, be it in design, engineering, manufacturing, or product support. But you have to be very strategic and deliberate about how to scale up. On the one hand, you have to build momentum with a portfolio of projects—some small, some medium-size, and a few in bigger, important areas. At the same time, you have to think long term.
