As an industry leader in aerospace and defence, EADS is constantly striving to build upon its solid reputation for excellence in its products, processes and people. With a focus on continual improvement and on building customer confidence by improving On-Time and On-Quality Delivery (“OTOQD”), EADS demands that every area of its operational business challenges and improves its levels of Quality and Operational Excellence, internally and throughout the supply chain.

Policy

• “EADS is fully committed to achieving the highest levels of customer satisfaction, driving continuous improvements in the quality of its products, processes and people and deploying the most demanding Quality Management Systems.
• EADS actively seeks key customer feedback through a structured Group-wide process of Customer Reviews.”

Organisation

The Chief Quality Officer (“CQO”) is in charge of stimulating, coaching and supporting the BUs to implement continual improvements in operational level OTOQD performance and to maintain and improve customer confidence in EADS.

In particular, he chairs an EADS Quality Council with senior level representatives from each BU to agree actions and priorities and to drive OTOQD deployment in all BUs.

CQO animates, supports and drives a network of BU operational level experts to ensure that the EADS Improvement Programme (“EIP”) is tuned directly to the needs, priorities and maturity of each BU.

He also represents EADS in relevant Quality, Standards and Regulatory bodies at both National and International level commensurate with the status of EADS as a global aerospace and defence company.

Performance and Best Practices

A major initiative was launched to deliver enhanced Customer confidence and satisfaction through driving operational improvements in those industrial processes which contribute to achieving OTOQD of products and services to end customers. In 2006, the EADS Improvement Programme was deployed throughout all EADS BUs.

This EIP programme acts on four key areas for improvement:

Customer Confidence

A common methodology was defined in early 2005, with a view to deploying it consistently throughout the Group. This Customer review process (“CRp”) methodology is based on a structured series of interviews targeting the key decision makers at EADS’ strategic customers. These interviews are performed by the BUs’ top management.

The goal is to measure the level of customer confidence, which is more important than satisfaction in determining its loyalty. EADS aims to assess and to continuously improve the relationships between the Group and each of its customers. Improvement plans result from these interviews, and the interviewer is responsible for reporting the progress of these plans to the interviewee.

In 2006, a total of thirteen CRps had been launched from the beginning of the programme. Three had totally completed the last “action plan” phase and are planning to start a second round in 2007. Six have their reporting and analysis phase completed and have entered into the “action plan” phase.

More complex CRps take place for Defence customers. They are conducted at national level rather than at BU level, governments’ procurement activities being by nature cross BUs. A Defence CRp was launched in each of the four EADS home nations.

Programme & Risk Management

In order to tackle and improve OTOQ delivery, EADS launched a group wide project in 2006 to improve Programme & Risk Management (“P&RM”) performance.

A common P&RM framework is being developed by a cross-functional & cross-Divisional team to standardise and modernise the key processes and tools for managing complex projects and programmes, to provide a common EADS P&RM language and terminology, to provide streamlined KPIs, reports and programme reviews, and to upgrade the approach to identification, training & development of programme managers in EADS.

Some of the key processes being addressed are:

• Risk & Opportunity Management to facilitate proactive identification, tracking and mitigation of risks, and extending this to identifying and capitalising on opportunities to improve programme performance.
• Independent phase reviews to carefully check the maturity of a programme at each of a series of defined phases before passing to the next phase.
• Integrated real-time multi-programme planning & execution to plan and optimise efficiency of the resources (people, parts, materials, etc.) across all programmes.
• Technical and Technology Readiness Level Assessments to take an independent expert ‘deep-dive’ look at selected programmes to assess the health of the programme and fidelity of the planning based on the technical maturity of the product or technology.
• Simplification of the audits, assessments and reviews that programmes are subjected to, looking at re-use of data to avoid asking the same questions over and over again for different reviews.
• Career development and succession planning strategies for programme management to deliver people with the right mix of multi-discipline, multi-functional and trans-national experience, training and skills.
• Forums for sharing and spreading Lessons Learned and Best Practices and fostering continuous improvement of P&RM practice & processes.

Lean Operation

Lean Operation in EADS is driving continual improvement in:

• The elimination of non value-adding activity
• Forging closer links throughout the supply chain
• Ensuring processes are robust in all operational workflows

All Divisions in EADS have been actively working in Lean based performance improvements in the manufacturing areas for several years. EADS is now focused on leveraging these individual improvement actions to accelerate deployment across the Group by actively spreading best practices and on extending the scope to develop Lean Supply Chain improvements.

In order to effectively drive this, EADS has created a Lean Operations council comprising senior executives from each Division having both the expertise and authority to drive lean based improvements within their respective Division.

DRIVER and EADS Black Belt

EADS now equips managers with an “Improvement Methodology and Toolkit”. This is the purpose of the “DRIVER” methodology defined in 2005, along with the complete training syllabus (more than 10 training modules and 30 tools). DRIVER is the EADS specific Improvement methodology. The corresponding training can be delivered in the format of “EADS Silver Belt” (2.5 days), “EADS Green Belt” (one week) or “EADS Black Belt” (four weeks). To be recognised as Qualified Improvers, EADS Black Belts must complete, on top of their training, an improvement project that can deliver measured benefits in terms of On Time on Quality Performance, costs savings, Customer Confidence or a mixture of the three elements.

A learning management system (“LMS”) supports and monitors the programme deployment, enabling also candidates to share best practices and use trans-BU networks for mutual support.

At the end of 2006, more that 200 people has been trained as EADS Black Belts in the sessions held around EADS Divisions and BUs. More than 50 EADS Black Belts have achieved their accreditation.