Airbus strengthens leadership position with more efficient organisation

n line with its 2020 Vision, Airbus lays out its plans for a more efficient and agile organisation to be implemented by January 2013.

This new organisation aims to boost Airbus' overall performance by shortening the lines of command, thus making the company more agile and capable of taking and implementing decisions faster. A more entrepreneurial spirit is promoted at plant level with a strong focus on deliveries - on time, quality and cost.

New ways of working are defined, empowering multifunctional teams at Airbus sites with engineering, procurement operations and quality being integrated at plant level. In order to increase simplicity, all engineering teams will be regrouped under one single leadership.

"This new organisation will help us to strengthen our leadership position," said Fabrice Brégier, President and Chief Executive Officer. "We are now ready to give more empowerment and on-the-spot decision-making to our local teams in order to scrap bureaucracy and shorten lines of command. Boost agility, efficiency and speed and meeting our high customers' expectations is the overriding driver for us.

This new organisation has all the ingredients to take our business excellence to the next level."

Customer focus, innovation and quality are already key elements of Airbus' DNA. The "first time right" approach is going to be strengthened by integrating the quality function at plant level. Supplier management will be further enforced by creating a procurement operations function. All the functions within a plant will deliver as one team under the leadership of the head of the plant, with the support of locally integrated procurement, engineering, production and quality teams. As a result, overall teamwork will become more important than ever.

Airbus is currently presenting this new organisation to its social partners.