Hot Topic: The Dreamliner Gallery – A Redefinition of the Sales Process

As we have said before, Boeing and Airbus are streamlining work-flow processes in an attempt to get costs down, improve quality, and add to the bottom line. Interestingly enough, this improvement applies to the sales process as well. Like Henry Ford said when he limited the front-end purchase desires, “You can have any color (Ford), as long as it is black!”

An airplane is a far cry from a consumer product so we hope our readers will forgive the aforementioned analogy. It does, however, help illustrate a point showed to IFExpress recently in the sparkling new Boeing 787 Dreamliner Gallery. Housed in a single story building in an industrial park near the Boeing Everett plant, “The Gallery” is an innovative and, in some cases, retrograded concept, used to finalize the components of BFE and SFE needed to build your B787. Firstly, there isn’t much BFE. The catalog of suppliers and their offerability is limited in many cases, but the benefit is a lower plane price (approximately $158M) and a greatly simplified definition process. The added benefit of interior configuration streamlining is getting the process finalized in about two days to two weeks!

Boeing looked at the complete airplane introduction process when they planned the B787. This included everything from seats, IFE, lavs, galleys, flooring, safety equipment and much more. The entire configuration process has many features but here are a few we thought were very interesting and sensible:

• Customers buy the Dreamliner for, more or less, one price. This means that the pricing has to be based on a mostly SFE-based plane. While this means the supplier base is more limited than it used to be, it keeps the process “clean” and limits changes and options. Further, Boeing told us that a customer can get options not in the catalog, but it would be “very, very expensive”.
• Airline customers can choose any sidewall color as long as it is white (sound familiar) however; they offer eight different surface options. Wall color is determined by the overhead LED lighting. There must be gnashing of teeth by the identity-minded airline marketers, however, the CFO’s are probably grinning all the way to the bank!
• The talented Teague services are included in the package. Airlines choose seat coverings, and other fabric and colored surfaces like carpets and dividers from the usual suspects, however, based on past choice offerings there may be fewer supplier choices with the Dreamliner. Boeing must not be having too many flaps over this selection-challenged process because over 500 Dreamliners have been sold to date and it is the fastest selling commercial airplane (at this point in the project) in history.

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