Swot Paper on Boeing Corp.

The objective of this paper is to analyze and discuss some of the Boeing Company’s business decisions using their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, also known as an S.W.O.T. analysis which is defined as, “a planning tool used to analyze an organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. (Nickels, McHugh, McHugh, page 216)”. This is a very powerful tool usable by any business that is just starting out, going through a change in direction, or in the process of a major merger. The SWOT analysis consists of a few simple steps which can provide valuable insight for direction and decision making. This paper will use The Boeing Company as an example of SWOT analysis application.

The Boeing Company originally started out as the Pacific Aero Products Co., which was founded on July 15, 1916. The name was changed about a year later to The Boeing Airplane Company. The Boeing Company stayed relatively small until World War I when they were selected by Navy officials to produce an order for 50 model C’s planes for the war efforts. The company continued to prosper and by the late 1950s, Boeing President William Allen knew that the company had the scientists, the experience and the facilities to lead the company into uncharted territories. He was right, Boeing has emerged as the leading aerospace company in the world today.

The SWOT process will start by examining the internal strengths of the Boeing Company of today. One of the most dominant strengths possessed by Boeing is its ability to follow the changes in a market that is continually changing. The type of products produced by The Boeing Company demands the use of state of the art technology while maintaining all the proper safe guards for safety, regulation compliance and profitability. An example of Boeing changing with market conditions is its introduction of outsourcing. Outsourcing is defined as “assigning various functions, such as accounting, production, security, maintenance, and legal work, to an outside organization. (Nickels, McHugh, McHugh, page 257). Boeing was spending more, taking longer, and producing a lower quality product which resulted in the loss of market share. Boeing went from the leading aerospace company to second place behind the European company Airbus.

Analysis showed that Boeing was having quality issues, expensive labor, and were not responsive to immediate demands from customers. Through a process such as SWOT a strategic direction change was proposed to allow outsourcing of many of the parts and sections of an airplane. Chuck Agne, the director for Boeing’s Integrated Defense System estimates that “about 65-70% of the content for a given airplane is procured from outside sources.” (Destefani, Jim, March 2004.) The outsourcing in so many different areas has left boeing with the time they needed to concentrate on customer input, design concepts, and aircraft assembly which have long been a strong point for Boeing. Finding the best companies to do business with allowed Boeing to produce higher quality products, faster production from design to implementation, and also allowed Boeing to reduce inventory and the associated management of the inventory. Just In Time (JIT) production with Boeing’s new outsourcing partners allowed the company to focus more on producing quality product in a timely manner. Quality has always been a trademark for Boeing and with this strategy quality is on the rise. According to Chuck Agne, “Our strategy