Outsourcing gone awry
Boeing faces an indefinite grounding of the Dreamliner because of a battery fire on a 787 in Boston and the smoldering of another battery on a flight in Japan a week later.
A National Transportation Safety Board update on Friday said an investigator will travel to a manufacturer in France to examine a battery contactor, which connects a wiring bundle from the airplane to the battery. 
Since the battery and its monitoring system were made in Japan, and all the connected pieces were integrated by French company Thales, blaming outsourcing for that and other electrical system faults is a reflexive response among Puget Sound-area employees and observers.
Yet Boeing has never made batteries, and the electrical systems on all its jets have always been sourced from outside suppliers, just like the engines and the landing gear. In that respect, the 787 is not different from Boeing jets like the 777 and the 737, both renowned for their reliability.
However, what is very different on the 787 is the structure of the outsourcing. 
On the Dreamliner, Boeing contracted with a top tier of about 50 suppliers, handing them complete control of the design of their piece of the plane. 
Those major partners had to make the upfront investment, share the risk and own their design. Each was responsible for managing its own subcontractors.
“For the 787, they changed the structure” of the supply chain, said Christopher Tang, professor of business administration at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and lead author of a much-cited 2009 case study of outsourcing on the 787. “You only know what’s going on with your tier 1 supplier. You have no visibility, no coordination, no real understanding of how all the pieces fit together.
“With a brand new design and so many parts and so many players, it’s a major challenge,” Tang said. “Can the management team trace all the way down the tree to every single supplier and unit? That’s really difficult.”
On the United flight in December, a short circuit and electrical arcing were caused by a fault in a module that controls a generator and plugs into the power panel motherboard.