The main supply chain challenges in modern aerospace and defense is to combine the traditional complex delivery and high safety requirements with the more recent objectives of shorter response time and better controlled cost including lower inventories and careful asset management.

This is also driven by an industry-wide lean initiative. Increasingly so, the recourse to commercial sub-contracting is an adequate answer to modernizing the A&D supply chains complemented by a robust supply chain information system.

"Integrating all aspects of the information supply chain is not a technology challenge. It's an affordability challenge that requires global standards for the efficient integration of the information supply chain. It's a contracting challenge that requires the transition from product to service type contracts."
John Buresh, Director, Boeing
Source: MIT

• "In aerospace we have to get inventory out of the system as it's a cost that everyone ends up paying."
  says Kent Brittan, vice president of supply management at United Technologies (UTC)
  Source: Financial Times