4.2.3: Case study- The Choked Supply Line

Solent Aeroengines: Three Teams, One Shortage, No Plan

Solent Aeroengines, based in Derby, was rolling out a portfolio of next-generation jet engines on a roadmap that had looked, until recently, like a genuine success story. Engineering test results were strong, and the plan, built jointly with input from engineering, procurement, and finance, showed a clear eighteen-month path to first deliveries. Fiona Clarke, the portfolio manager, had been telling the executive committee for months that the program was as close to on-track as a project this complex ever got.

Then the titanium market tightened all at once. A combination of mining disruptions and surging global demand pushed suppliers who used to guarantee delivery within weeks into quoting lead times of several months, with no firm promise those new estimates would even hold. Titanium sat inside several of the engine's most critical components, and the roadmap had been built around a delivery cadence that assumed exactly the supply reliability that had just disappeared.

Three teams responded to the shortage almost simultaneously, and none of them talked to each other first. Raj Malhotra, on procurement, found an Australian supplier who could deliver titanium reliably, but only at a 40 percent price premium and only enough volume to cover about 60 percent of what the program actually needed. He signed a provisional agreement for that partial supply without escalating it, reasoning that securing some titanium was better than debating the shortfall while doing nothing. Diane Osei, running production, quietly slowed down work on non-critical spares to stretch the titanium already sitting in inventory, adjusting her team's internal schedule without formally flagging the change upward, since it felt, to her, like the kind of operational judgment call a production lead was supposed to make on their own. Tom Ashworth, in materials engineering, started investigating whether an alternative alloy could substitute for titanium in some components, a change that would require entirely new engineering validation and a fresh regulatory approval from the civil aviation authority, a process his own team estimated could take anywhere from six to fourteen months depending on how quickly the regulator responded.

Managing Director Alan Pierce had said, more than once in leadership meetings, that Solent's internal engineering discipline was strong enough that the program didn't need to worry much about outside noise. "Our roadmap holds because our planning process is rigorous," he told the board only weeks before the shortage hit. "We don't let external market conditions dictate our engineering timeline." That confidence turned out to rest on an assumption the titanium market had just quietly disproven. A shortage on the other side of the world could invalidate a carefully built internal roadmap just as completely as a design flaw could, and Solent's planning discipline had nothing built into it that accounted for that kind of external dependency failing all at once.

Fiona found out how fragmented the response had become almost by accident, cross-checking three separate status reports that no longer agreed with each other or with the roadmap she'd presented to the executive committee the month before. Raj's supplier deal covered barely more than half the program's titanium needs at a cost nobody had approved. Diane's inventory stretching had bought time on non-critical spares while quietly pushing other deliverables later without anyone above her noticing yet. Tom's alloy substitution research was moving forward on a timeline that could resolve the shortage permanently or take over a year, and nobody had decided whether the program could actually wait that long to find out. Three sensible, independent decisions had turned one supply shortage into three different, uncoordinated versions of the same roadmap, none of which matched what customers had actually been told to expect.

Fiona brought all three threads into a single portfolio-level review and pushed the group toward a blended plan rather than picking one path outright. Raj's partial supplier agreement would cover the nearest-term engine builds, accepting the cost premium as the price of keeping those deliveries close to schedule. Tom's alloy substitution work would continue in parallel as the longer-term fix, with its outcome still genuinely uncertain. Diane's production adjustments would be formally incorporated into the revised schedule instead of running as an undocumented workaround. The portfolio's overall delivery date moved from eighteen months to twenty-four, a six-month slip Fiona brought to the customer airlines directly rather than letting them discover it through missed milestones. One airline's procurement director pushed back hard on the call, wanting to know why the delay hadn't been flagged sooner given how long Solent had apparently known about the shortage internally. Fiona didn't have a fully comfortable answer, since the honest one involved three teams reacting independently for weeks before anyone above them had the full picture.

Whether the twenty-four-month date would actually hold was still an open question by the end of the review. Raj's Australian supplier had made no commitment beyond covering 60 percent of demand, leaving the remaining volume dependent on a spot market that had only gotten tighter. Tom's alloy validation could land anywhere inside its six-to-fourteen-month range, and the revised roadmap had been built around the middle of that estimate rather than either edge of it. Fiona closed the review having replaced three uncoordinated guesses with one coordinated plan, though she wasn't yet sure whether that plan was genuinely more resilient than the guesses it replaced, or simply a more detailed version of the same optimism, built on assumptions about a supplier's spot capacity and a regulator's timeline that neither Solent nor anyone else in the room actually controlled.

Discussion Questions \(\PageIndex{1}\)

1. Raj, Diane, and Tom each responded to the titanium shortage independently before Fiona discovered the fragmentation. Which of these three responses, if any, should have been escalated to the portfolio level immediately, and what specific harm resulted from letting each team act on its own for weeks?
2. Given that Raj's supplier could cover only 60 percent of the program's titanium needs at a 40 percent premium, and Tom's alloy substitution carried a six-to-fourteen-month uncertainty window, was Fiona's blended plan and revised twenty-four-month date a sound response to build the roadmap around, or should she have committed to a single path instead of hedging across both?
3. Fiona told the airline customers about the six-month delay only once the portfolio-level plan was finalized, rather than as soon as the shortage first appeared. Was that the right amount of information at the right time, or did the customer's pushback about not being told sooner reveal a real gap in how the delay should have been communicated?