Canadian aerospace and the supply chain challenge: a structural problem, or just a passing phase?

If we are to believe that the Canadian workforce has changed its expectations of work—a shorter workweek, a remote operating environment, a rebalanced work-life model—it is undeniable that the measures of productivity and efficiency used by industry pre-COVID-19 must be recalibrated to reflect the post-COVID mindset. Alongside this recalibration of workforce metric, supply chain redesign is the new business imperative. This redesign must address the traditional supply chain activities of supplier selection, logistics practices, distribution methods, and inventory management, but now also needs to address risk management, ethics, sustainability, visibility, resilience, and data protection. How ready is the Canadian aerospace sector to deal with this expanded scope of supply chain issues? The Canadian aerospace domain is incurring severe—and some say extreme—duress in its abilities to deliver to market expectations. Supply chain disruptions are being touted as the villains by many industry partners, from component suppliers, to airframe builders, to aircraft operators, to aviation support organizations. The level of disruption has been attributed by many to have its genesis in the COVID-19 pandemic and the innumerable incidents of supply chain incidents involving workforce availability, transportation pauses, and facilitation complexities, among others. Were these disruptions temporary as the world dealt with the pandemic, or are we witnessing a fundamental change in the way work is being performed? The aerospace supply chain has had its fair share of disruption prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Interruptions in component supplies were prevalent due to shortages of primary materials, retirements of experienced baby boom-era fabricators, and surging aerospace orders from commercial aviation and defence sources. Post-COVID phenomena such as surges in passenger demand have seen airlines order commercial aircraft that have a projected delivery into the next decade, putting pressure on the airframe manufacturers to increase their production rates, even as they struggle to achieve their traditional production levels. John Gradek is a professional engineer and academic program co-ordinator of the Supply Networks programs at McGill’s School of Continuing Studies in Montreal. Photograph courtesy of John Gradek The challenges facing Canadian aerospace’s supply chain are shared by other industrial domains, including automotive, pharmaceutical, and others with long, thin, resource-intensive supply networks. Many of these adjacent supply chains have taken steps to shorten their supply networks by either near- or re-shoring suppliers, increasing the use of technology-focused manufacturing aids, and the sharing and integration of data along the supply chain to improve visibility, reducing stockouts and lowering inventory. It is this last element of data sharing that would need government support. Today’s corporations are loath to share data on their operations and forecasts, data that would be considered as proprietary and of significant competitive rivalry. The world, and certain industrial domains, have embarked on several initiatives to create data-exchange regimes where supply networks have been constructed with greater visibility of production rates, logistics, and sales forecasts among the length of the network. This repository of data allows the members of the network to better plan their resources, their facilities, and their distribution practices, thereby lowering costs, improving delivery, and operating robust supply networks. The digital supply chain needs this data exchange, and Canadian aerospace must be an active participant to maintain its leading position. Government needs to step into this by enabling an environment that permits the exchange of data in as neutral a manner as possible, and promote the development of effective and efficient decision-making based on trusted data. Canadian aerospace can most definitely move along this path of data sharing to extend both supply-chain visibility as well as supply-chain resilience as they move to address increasing demand for Canada’s high-quality aerospace products. Government action to facilitate and promote the digital Canadian aerospace supply chain is going to be key to its prosperity and, potentially, survival. John Gradek is a professional engineer and academic program co-ordinator of the Supply Networks programs at McGill’s School of Continuing Studies in Montreal. The Hill Times