Boeing

The Boeing Company and KLM Engineering and Maintenance have begun implementing the Global Airline Inventory Network^SM (GAIN) at the airline's maintenance facility in Amsterdam. KLM is the European launch customer for GAIN, a value-added service in which Boeing will manage KLM's supply chain for expendable airframe parts.

Establishing GAIN operations in Europe is a further step by Boeing to provide more value to customers while helping them reduce costs. The KLM implementation creates a logistics-rich environment at the Amsterdam airport in Schiphol to provide KLM with approximately 27,000 airframe expendable part numbers in support of the airline's Boeing fleet as well as the fleets of those airlines that rely on KLM Engineering and Maintenance (KLM E&M) as their maintenance provider.

The implementation effort involves a joint Boeing-KLM E&M team at KLM's Schiphol East facility.

"We are very pleased to have taken yet another step in our working-together partnerships with KLM," said Bill Krebs, director of GAIN for Boeing. "KLM now can take full advantage of the synergy created by our Amsterdam Spares Center, the Spares Exchange Program and GAIN."

Following are highlights of the network:

• Boeing will be responsible for the purchasing, inventory management and logistics for KLM's expendable airframe parts.
• Boeing and the supply base will own the airframe parts that are "forward deployed" until they actually are used or consumed by KLM. KLM pays for parts only as it uses them, reducing the airline's inventory holding costs and improving their return on assets.
• To support the program, Boeing is developing a new computing system to integrate supply and consumption information from the airlines and their maintenance facilities.

Additional airlines are continuing to discuss GAIN with Boeing, which anticipates further growth for the program in 2002 and beyond.