In order to respond to the market demands and create additional value for customers and airlines, Airbus decided to develop a new member of its wide-body Family, Airbus A350 XWB. The A350XW’s benefits of the new manufacturing and assembly techniques, applied on other aircraft of the Airbus Family, such as the A330 and the A380. It also utilizes a supply chain based on the lessons learned over the time from other programs. The paper analyzes the structure of A350 supply chain, describes Airbus’s challenges for managing this supply chain, and highlights some key lessons that could be taken into consideration for the next supply chains of the new product development.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.