Profits in Motion
Through its three-stage RFID implementation, Airbus is gaining large-scale visibility into its business and production processes—and realizing jumbo savings.
By Elizabeth Wasserman
RFID Journal Award Winner: Best RFID Implementation
June 1, 2008—Airbus tends to do everything on a large scale. The company manufactures the world's biggest passenger airplane: the 525-passenger A380, dubbed the "Superjumbo." Its supply chain involves hundreds of suppliers of airplane parts, ranging from tires and brakes to seats and carpeting—and Airbus' value chain extends to its numerous airline and government customers, and regional maintenance and repair operations. Airbus itself, headquartered in Toulouse, France, operates 16 plants throughout Europe that make various components or sections of planes, which are transported to final assembly locations.
So it's no surprise that instead of adopting radio frequency identification technology in a piecemeal fashion, the aerospace giant took a "systematic and holistic" approach. "For the past four years, the entire Airbus team has performed the hard work to get ready to deploy RFID on an industrial scale," says Carlo K. Nizam, head of value-chain visibility and RFID for Airbus. "We set our sights on wanting to 'set the standard' and be a model for large-company global execution of an RFID-inspired visibility program."
June 1, 2008—Airbus tends to do everything on a large scale. The company manufactures the world's biggest passenger airplane: the 525-passenger A380, dubbed the "Superjumbo." Its supply chain involves hundreds of suppliers of airplane parts, ranging from tires and brakes to seats and carpeting—and Airbus' value chain extends to its numerous airline and government customers, and regional maintenance and repair operations. Airbus itself, headquartered in Toulouse, France, operates 16 plants throughout Europe that make various components or sections of planes, which are transported to final assembly locations.
So it's no surprise that instead of adopting radio frequency identification technology in a piecemeal fashion, the aerospace giant took a "systematic and holistic" approach. "For the past four years, the entire Airbus team has performed the hard work to get ready to deploy RFID on an industrial scale," says Carlo K. Nizam, head of value-chain visibility and RFID for Airbus. "We set our sights on wanting to 'set the standard' and be a model for large-company global execution of an RFID-inspired visibility program."
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