Journal of Economics and Sustainable Development www.iiste.org ISSN 2222-1700 (Paper) ISSN 2222-2855 (Online) Vol.8, No.10, 2017 20 Logistics and Supply Chain: An Overview of Business Jet Aircraft Manufacturing Ashfaque A. Mohib 1 Ramit Azad 1 Subarna Haque 2 Md. Faruque Hossain 3* 1.Associate Professor, Department of Operations and Supply Chain Management, Faculty of Business Administration, American International University-Bangladesh, House 58/B, Road#21, Kemal Ataturk Avenue, Dhaka-1213, Bangladesh 2.CSCA, Department of Chemical Enginerring, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka, Bangladesh 3.Professor, Department of Operations and Supply Chain Management, Faculty of Business Administration, American International University-Bangladesh, House 58/B, Road#21, Kemal Ataturk Avenue, Dhaka-1213, Bangladesh Abstract The paper highlights key points of aircraft manufacturing and supply chain, which includes key supply chain stages of macro processes and logistics of material flow through a network of stages, organization and workstations. Supply chain refers to a series of facilities, with sequence of activities involved in producing and delivering of a product and service. The study was done through personal work experience in an aircraft factory, watching video documentary on National Geography Chanel, literature review of Federal Aviation Administration manuals, books, newspaper articles, aircraft manufacturing websites, and other internet survey. The network of stages starts from ultimate supplier, in the form of raw material, ends up to the final customer, in the form of finished goods. Logistics involve movement of materials, funds, and information between these stages of a supply chain, in a coordinated way. In some large manufacturing facility, such as an aircraft manufacturing factory, multiple stages of supply chain are found within the factory premise itself. Within a specific stage, production lines are found, such that workers and machines are grouped together with a sequence of assigned activities to produce customized, handcrafted, yet standardized outputs. Zooming from supply chain macro level process to micro level manufacturing processes, together with transportation and logistics of material between the stages are highlighted. Keywords: Aircraft Manufacturing, Logistics, Transporation, Supply Chain and Opertions Management. 1. Introduction There have been a lot of thoughts, ideas, presentations, literatures books, certification programs, publications and seminars for a couple of decades, making the supply chain management concept and philosophy very popular around the world. Most of the literatures mainly cover inventory management, sourcing, logistics, distribution, and transportation as their primary thoughts of supply chain management. These thoughts are mostly related to moderate to fast moving products and there manufacturing and distribution of inventories. However, there has not been any substantial literature published on the aircraft supply chain management. Therefore, it is worth of study to explore the overview of supply chain management regarding aircraft manufacturing from macro to micro level processes. Supply chain management theories, concepts and formulas are being widely accepted and practiced in many industries. However, there are little indication or readily available evidence that such practices are well known or being practiced in aviation industry. Practitioners in aviation industry is using manufacturing, industrial engineering and operations management theories, concepts, and formulae in a limited scope from an organizational (single stage) prospective, without showing any sign of being practiced from end to end supply chain point of view. The statement of the problem of this research is: What are the relationships between the well known concepts of supply chain management and aircraft manufacturing macro to micro level precesses? How are the aircraft manufacturing processes related to the types of inventory, mode of transportations, logistcs within the organization and facility layout of aircraft assembly line, zooming in from macro to micro level processes? The key concepts of supply chain management, operations management, inventory, logistics and transporation are reviewed and relationship with the aircraft manufacturing are highlighted by an exploratory research. The definitions for above concepts were extracted from two prominent books. Most of the information were gathered through video documentary, aircraft manufacturers website and other relevent internet survey, for connecting the relationship with the denitions and practices are the novilty of current research. Thorough involvement by aviators, academicians, researchers in supply chain management studies, practices and optimization modeling in aircraft manufacturing processes would bring about substantial benefits to aircraft industry. Hence, this research tries to give an overview of supply chain management in relationship with aircraft manufacturing, specifically high level inventory, logistics, and material flow.