Lessons Learnt from Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A380 Projects for Murasaki Aircraft Corporation

The essay analyzes the lessons learnt from the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A380 projects for Murasaki Aircraft Corporation. It provides recommendations and strategies for project management based on the failures of these projects. The analysis covers the background of the projects, lessons learnt, and recommendations for MAC.

Running head: PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Project Management
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Introduction
The Murasaki Aircraft Corporation or MAC is a relatively new aircraft manufacturer
in Japan. The new Project Director has been appointed to make sure that the operations of the
organisation are working properly. The CEO of the company would like to make it grow
further to the next level although the organisation has no ambition of competing with Boeing
and Airbus since the organisation has already manufacturing Boeing 787's wings. The CEO
of the organization wants that the company gets to the next level from medium size passenger
jet further reaching the bigger markets directly. It can be done by competing with the Boeing
and the Airbus. for this the company needs to analyse what went wrong with the Boeing 787
Dreamliner lightweight construction technology and the Airbus A380 aircraft to make sure
that these are not repeat it again and the problems that played their projects are not
implemented or can be avoided in this organisation. For this, analysis of what went wrong
with the previous project would be analysed as well as recommendation on how MAC can
form the benefit from the previous analysis would be projected.
Background of the projects
Boeing 787 Dreamliner: Boeing is an American multinational organisation which
reportedly manufactures and sells as well as designs various airplanes, rockets, rotorcraft as
well as satellites. In 2003 Boeing started developing its ambitious project of 787 Dreamliner
which dragged over many years and had a total cost of about a billion dollars. At the present
moment the 787 Dreamliner operates fully with its 200 planes frying all around the world,
however it can never be said that this project was always successful (Shenhar et al. 2016).
There were various problems to this project, both in the developing of the aircraft and other
problems coupled with the decision making processes. For the organisation of Boeing, the

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787 Dreamliner had been a nightmare between the year 2003 and 2013. The project had
already done past is deadline and the cost had increased at an exponential rate as a result. The
supply chain was equally complex and difficult for managing and the powers that be in the
Boeing made it very hard to come to a conclusion or make a decision about outsourcing the
design on manufacturing the majority parts of 787 (Abbas 2017). it was found that the reason
for this entire problem was conducting the in-house task to decrease cost which has resulted
in further running past of deadline for the project and decision making problems regarding
outsourcing the designs. As a result the outsourcing decision has made the organisation of
Boeing cost a billion dollars. It is not possible that the contradicting part of this particular
failure for the project was not due to a lot of billions to a supply chain which is extremely
complex but the decision that was made regarding the project. Boeing already received a lot
of advice from the technical experts even before the project was initiated to keep up with the
traditional methods of design and manufacture accordingly as the up to date company
procedures. To cut for the cost Boeing had ignored all the advices by the technical experts
and this is resulted in the project failure for 787 Dreamliner (Nguyen et al. 2018).
Airbus A380: Just like the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, there has been another project
failure of Airbus 380. The project failure of Airbus 380 cannot be attributed directly as a
Project failure for the management has tried to change the internal culture of the organisation
but found it impossible to implement due to political reason. The Airbus was first to create a
consortium of the previously existing companies including 16 sites in four European
countries (Kossmann 2016). In the year 2008 bus undertake the most ambitious project ever
in the organisation's history. This project was known as airbus A380, which was an aircraft
design for ushering the new era of super Jumbo jets and had a capacity of carrying out about
853 passengers including the crew. The date of the launch was selected to be in 2002 and the
company and already taken additional steps for the integration of the consortium announcing

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a new administrative structure for the organisation (Reitsma et al. 2017). It was established
that the new structure would make sure that the top managers are physically located from
each of the 16 sites in a single location. The reorganization has put an end to the conflict of
the cross purposes which frequently orchid with the geographical e dispersed organisation
however the changes where you want to be not fulfilling or inadequate. From the spring of
2005, the production problems begin to resurface and both the French and German
production facilities started blaming one another in the open public I regarding the deliveries
when they were postponed since the fall of 2005 and the spring of 2006 (Freimuth 2016). The
wiring harness problems started surfacing in Hamburg and it resulted in improper fitting of
the frame when the plane went to the assembly stage in the Toulouse plant. The software that
the Hamburg plant was using was much older version of CATIA, which is a software used in
the aircraft industry. Although the Toulouse plant claim that they had been using the most
upgraded version of the software the compatibility issues still lingered in both the versions
according to the design specification as it could not flow in the electronic way between the
interchanging of information for the two plants. The Airbus was then regardless of any choice
but they had to hold the production and postpone all the deliveries for the next two years
while redesigning the entire production system including the wiring facilities. The cost had
already exceeded 26 billion USD and the project was 2 years behind schedule. It was only in
October 15, 2007 that the first aircraft from A380 was delivered to the Singapore airlines
(Kossmann 2016).
Analysis of Lessons Learnt from the Airbus A380 and 787 Dreamliner Projects
Boeing 787 Dreamliner: The Boeing 787 Dreamliner project had multiple levels of
failure but there are two lessons that can be learnt from the entire mishap. First and foremost
there is a level of simplicity and processes within every project and that has the most

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important in the establishment of any kind of project management (Petrescu et al. 2017). The
entire process of project management is oriented through several levels of discipline that
needs to be maintained at every stage of a particular project. It is always necessary that a
project management procedure follows a step-by-step initiation right from the beginning of
the project to its very end. This gives a steel clear provision for analysing any point of risk or
threat and identification of the potential risks or threat would automatically make the entire
project much simpler since decisions would be taken accordingly to remove these risks and
threats to move freely further with the project. The outsourcing of design and manufacturing
the 787 project was one of the biggest mistakes that Boeing made during its project
propagation since outsourcing the entire design and manufacturing for 787 woods naturally
make the organisation lose out all the controls for the home organisation regarding the
processing of the entire project (Hwang et al. 2019). This would further complicate in the
matters and cause a litany of misconceptions and others through the entire project would be
much difficult to overcome. Secondly, it can be said that ignoring the technical experts was
the biggest mistake that the organisation of Boeing could ever make. The organization of
Boeing had already received warning from the technical expert about the dangers of
outsourcing the manufacturing and designing process. They were also advised to keep the
manufacturing and design process within the organisation and not indulge in outsourcing.
However, the organisation has already ignored all the advices from the technical expert and
thus, as a result, the entire project filled with billions of dollars lost (Mishra, Chandrasekaran
and MacCormack 2015). Therefore it can be said that all the decision making processes that
Boeing had taken during its ambitious 787 project was all a victim of wrong decision making.
Airbus A380: There are various journals posted on the failing of the project for
Airbus A380, and all the researchers have suggested that the entire failure of the project
cannot be attributed to a single technical problem or the problem of the project managers in

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handling the entire project (Bronte-Stewart 2015). It was rather suggested that the entire
problem was at a much larger scale and the hierarchical levels of failures should be blamed in
the first place (Flouris and Lock 2016). It was suggested that a convoluted management
structure was what the organisation was plagued with syncing all the managers at the
headquarters as they were loyal to their constituents who they were supposed to report to
previously. However the entire problem of A380 can be blamed upon the failure of technical
issues by implementing the new administrative structure and the physical location of the top
managers from each of the 16 sites to be accessible from a single location. All the problems
we are not just technical, since they where some adjusting problems of the outdated versions
of the software the up to date version of the software to become compatible to the devices
provided. On the other hand, there was a very less source of constant and feasible
communication between the headquarters located at various regions. They put the entire
project handling and management of the entire project from different levels was responsible
for the failure of Airbus A380 (Leoncini 2016). If it was told to list the lesson learnt from the
entire project failure, it can be put together that the problem resided in the management of the
several aspects of the technical and physiological parts of the project. However it can also be
said that the very political grounds of all the headquarters located in various organisations
was also a reason that failed the project to have a unified organisational culture. This was also
a reason for the organisation to handle the project feasibility which resulted in use failure of
Airbus A380, resulting in the delay of production and meet the organisation have a huge
financial loss (Kutsch and Hall 2016).
Recommendations on how the MAC Project can benefit from this analysis
The Murasaki Aircraft Corporation or MAC is a new aircraft manufacturer in Japan
and has the Murasaki Heavy Industries as its parent organisation. The Murasaki Heavy

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Industries is one of the share holders for MAC, and the others include the Toyota Motor
Corporation and Mitsubishi Corporation including Sumitomo Corporation and Mitsui and Co.
with minor shares (Altfeld 2016).
Since the organisation is not looking for competing with either of the organisation
Boeing and Airbus, send on the same context the CEO of the organisation wants the company
to grow further, it should always take the lessons from the failure of both the organisation and
its projects. including all the shareholders in the decision making process would be one of the
best strategies that the organisation could apply, is this is one area where Boeing 787 could
have paid more attention about while their project progression (Shokoohyar, Qi and Katok
2017).
On the other hand the Airbus A380 project failure provides information that the
project progression should always be simple and step by step. The initiation of entire project
should also be checked so that the use of all the technical aspects within the project is
compatible to the devices used (Leoncini 2017). This was another mistake committed by
Airbus during the ambitious project of A380, which MAC can learn and implement to avoid
mistakes further.
Conclusion
Therefore, in conclusion it can be said that, the Murasaki Aircraft Corporation, being
a new aircraft manufacturing organisation, should always take inspiration from the immediate
competitors and also learn from the mistakes that they have made. The organisation of MAC
should also learn the mistakes that both Boeing and Airbus had committed during the
progress of the most ambitious project of 787 Dreamliner and A380 respectively. The above
analysis is found out all the problems that both the projects had during and after its project

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resulting in huge loss of money and time, both very important assets for an organisation, and
had resulted in being an example of what the budding and upcoming organisations should not
take up send avoid during their own projects. In the similar way all the analysis made during
this essay has followed both the projects and made list of mistakes that the companies had
committed. From this it can easily pointed out what MAC should not commit further, or
should not implement during the project management for manufacturing their aircrafts in
future.

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