„The 21st Century Airbus must be more efficient and quieter than its predecessors. It must provide the air companies with better performance and their customers with more comfort. It must be everything that an airline manager dreams of and yet not cost as much as today’s machines. To bridge this gap state-of-the-art information technology must be used from day one.” This task description given in 1998 by Daimler-Benz Aerospace in their magazine AEROSPACE launched their concept ACE for the planning and development of new aircraft.

Airline managers are not the only ones with these requirements. Exactly the same situation is facing unit managers in a wide range of businesses who have to plan and achieve the fulfillment of their requirements within fixed commercial constraints and as quickly as possible using technology and IT. Analog to the situation in the airline industry, for reasons of efficiency an increasing number of companies are dividing up the development and operation of their information systems between different partners: IT service providers with varying specializations and both internal and external providers. However, this method of intelligent sourcing preferred by many companies also inherently increases the distance between the different parties involved in the planning and implementation process. Partners with different competences from both IT service providers and the customer work together on complex tasks. The time required for the planning of new or more advanced IT support, particularly in areas relevant to the customer’s competitive position, is becoming increasingly critical for the IT service provider.


This article discusses the general potential of a partner-like sourcing relationship between IT service providers and their customers, and the particular case of joint planning and implementation processes. Suggestions will be made as to how such processes can be structured and implemented. For IT service providers in particular the adoption of the joint planning and implementation method presented offers an opportunity for them to present themselves to their customers as competent and strong partners. The ability to work close to the pulse of the customer’s business using this form of cooperation can provide clear competitive differentiation and thus enable the establishment of a long term, dynamic and profitable sourcing relationship.


Airbus collected the above-described initiatives for the optimization of planning and production processes under the title Airbus Concurrent Engineering (ACE). In general this type of effort in production is known as concurrent planning. The central idea of concurrent planning is a shift away from strict task division and towards mixed project teams within the planning process. The project teams carry out an overall evaluation of the requirements of the solution to be developed by compiling the views of those affected from each of the partner organizations. In the context of intelligent sourcing this means that experts from the various customer and IT service provider’s departments produce potential solutions for sub-projects which combine the technically possible with the economically feasible while solving the business problem in question. The times in which business units delivered specifications to the IT service provider, who then submitted a priced implementation plan which was negotiated in a number of time-intensive iteration loops, have definitely passed.
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