C Series will probably be late - Panimj Hi Panimj, thanks for your response. You asked,
"Don't you think sorting things out with suppliers is part of the progress before they receive parts from suppliers?"
Yes, it's part of what one should expect from any company, but particularly a company like Bombardier, which is working hard to improve its overall efficiencies.
Many companies in the areospace and defence sector have made significant strides in recent years in this direction. They've cut costs by working with suppliers, and coordinating efforts to give more business to suppliers that demonstrate they can get the job done more effectively and at lower cost.
Still, no one in this, or any other business is anywhere near perfection. And it's always a question of balancing costs with quality of materials and workmanship.
To suggest everything can be worked out in advance might be a little too simple. All companies struggle with this. You can examples of it at Goodrich which recently had some problems with its landing gear systems, and a few years back when a supplier of brakes (to Bombardier) on some Acela trains turned out to be cracking prematurely.
It would certainly be better if everything could be worked out with suppliers in advance, but even if you could get your plans to where they looked just right, you can be sure something would change - or at least come in differently from what you'd anticipated.
While I believe Bombardier is doing a good job of planning CSeries development it still seems reasonable to expect some measure of misalignment, along with some unanticipated changes which will throw things out of whack.
Bombardier miscalculated when it assigned work on Learjet 85 to Grob, which subsequently went out of business. As a result Bombardier has set up its own facilities in Mexico to perform the same function. In other words it has taken the work in-house. Boeing ran into something similar on its 787 development when it decided to buy out a supplier of fasteners.
That may be a good way to expand the company vertically, but setting up your own facilities to do the job of a supplier isn't something you can do every time a supplier runs into trouble.
The Chinese have become proficient at churning out low quality goods at a functional level. With aerospace they're on a much steeper learning curve. For safety reasons, parts used in the aerospace industry require much finer measurements and more stringent quality control.
From what I can gather early indications are mixed with some sections meeting the rigorous standards involved and other work having to be re-contracted to North American suppliers.