SEABLOG

There are hundreds of suppliers across the country implementing the SEA Roadmap. There are a variety of ways to implement the Roadmap. Some suppliers have trained a key person or two in the SEA Leader workshop (included in the BASIC+ membership) and these suppliers are using their internal resources and sometimes their favorite consultants to implement. Some suppliers have hired a lean “guru” or expert to help them with the Operational Excellence track of the Roadmap. Hiring one or more people to dedicate to improvement signals to our customers that we are willing to invest on an ongoing basis and is very encouraging that we, the supplier, “get it.”

Some suppliers invest in outside consulting because they want to learn faster. The details of how to look at investments of this kind are at here.

Regardless of how and how fast you go, suppliers can remain integrated into the SEA process by submitting the quarterly report letting the SEA members that you are actively improving your operations - including leadership processes, workforce development processes, and operational processes. The quarterly report format is located here.

Once a supplier has mastered stage one of the Roadmap, they are ready to submit to the SEA Stage One certification. This certification designed by suppliers for suppliers establishes your achievement and progress toward excellence. The SEA Supplier brand means excellence in the aerospace and defense industry.

Implementing the SEA Roadmap can be daunting especially to smaller companies. The implementation goes beyond anything you might encounter in AS9100 although the two overlap and work together in many ways. The Roadmap requires that the supplier build an infrastructure to support and sustain improvement. It’s like taking a normal car and building it for racing - you have to change the engine, the transmission, the suspension, and the tires. The car might look the same, but it is built for acceleration, handling, and safety at high speeds.

Some suppliers are busy painting flames or racing stripes on the outside of the car. That’s where SEA Business Results come in. If you can demonstrate continuous movement in your Inventory Turns, On-Time Delivery, Parts per Million Defects, and Sales per Employee, chances are you’re on the right track.

To compete globally in the new world economy, we need to build an organization that can accelerate improvement and can sustain those improvements once they are made.

There are some that say this is 80% of the game for accelerating performance. Most leaders think of lean and six sigma as things that take place on the shop floor, but without a complete understanding of these disciplines, it is unlikely that leadership will be able to support continuing improvements and formulate strategies and practices that encourage and reward people for changing how they work.

We can’t under-estimate the value of having leading taking the initiative to practice what they’re asking others to do. Creating five level 3 maturity leadership processes with process owners and a champion demonstrates to everyone that leadership is taking its own medicine. This has a lot of cultural impact by itself.

Process Maturity is a discipline. It’s roots are in AS9100 but in order to be useful and valuable it has to be practiced and re-enforced by everyone. It says that we value standard work practices, that we the disciplined approach of following processes that have been designed to prevent most of the common errors and mistakes that we know we don’t want to repeat.

Leadership can explain why this new discipline and practice is so important in reducing cost, and improving performance to the customer. Leadership can make Standard Work make sense and the Process Maturity Model can help leadership explain how to get there.

SEA is an industry-wide initiative to help suppliers who are committed to excellence distinguish themselves among the many who are not.

How do you distinguish a supplier who is committed to excellence? The barriers are many including lack of a common language and framework, lack of agreed upon metrics, lack of common definitions, and lack of an agreed upon roadmap for how to get there.

SEA was founded by industry primes and tier one contractors who knew that in order for an industry transformation to be successful, it had to be supplier-led.

The Roadmap, the Quarterly Report, the Certification, and the Awards System are maintained by the Supplier Advisory Council in order to assist our entire industry in defining the best of the best.