GM Nameplate isn’t exactly a household name, but its products are well-known to anyone who has flown on a Boeing airplane in recent years.

From a midsized room in a nondescript Seattle building, the family-owned company produces a vast array of graphics that go into Boeing airplanes, from the signs telling passengers where their seats are to the technical instructions for pilots and mechanics.

In all, it amounts to more than a million pieces a year, each meeting a specific airline’s color, branding and language specifications. Just getting the right hue of white to match each airline’s interior walls can be a challenge.

“It’s amazing how many different formulations we have,” said Greg Root, president of the company's superGraphics division.

Boeing Co. is one of the nation’s biggest and best-known manufacturers, employing 158,000 workers and producing tens of billions of dollars worth of commercial jets and defense systems annually for customers worldwide. But to assemble just one model of airplane — the 737, its smallest and most popular commercial jet — the company relies on a complex web of hundreds of suppliers providing everything from engines and fuselages to seats and exit signs.

“We can’t be experts in everything,” said Helene Michael, vice president of manufacturing operations for the 737 program.

Instead, Boeing likes to think of itself as an expert in getting all the parts in the right place at the right time, and then putting them together quickly.

“We kind of pride ourselves on being a large-scale systems integrator,” said John Hamilton, chief engineer for the 737 program.

While it can make good financial sense to integrate parts rather than build everything in-house, Boeing has learned the hard way — via its much-delayed 787 program — that there are also serious risks in relying too heavily on others. But with the commercial airplane industry poised to grow more competitive, and cash-strapped airlines looking for any way to pinch pennies, making airplanes cheaper and more efficiently may be the only way manufacturers can survive.

“The more efficient we get, the longer we stay in the phone book,” Michael said.

The 737, which is made up of 367,000 parts, is assembled at a factory in Renton, Wash., south of Seattle. Boeing delivered 372 of the single-aisle 737s last year — a little more than one a day. Its chief rival, Europe's Airbus, delivered 402 of its comparable A320 family of planes in the same period.

Faster, cheaper, better

To appeal to airlines and compete with Airbus, Boeing has not hesitated to outsource when there may be a cost savings. About five years ago, it even went so far as to spin off the Wichita, Kan., operation that makes 737 fuselages and other airplane parts. That now-independent company, Spirit Aerosystems, also does work for competing aerospace companies.

In part because Boeing serves so many large international airline customers, the company also relies heavily on international suppliers. Among major suppliers, China’s Xian Aircraft Co. makes the some 737 vertical fins, and Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries provides the wing’s inboard flaps.

“We recognize we can’t build every single piece of the plane in America,” Michael said.

But as one of the nation's top exporters and a major defense contractor, Boeing also recognizes the importance of keeping its assembly factories on U.S. soil.

Delicate balance

Boeing executives admit that it can be tough to find the right balance between what it makes at its own plants and what it acquires from outside companies.

The company has conceded it tipped too far in the wrong direction with the 787, which is undergoing test flights some two years behind schedule. Boeing relied extensively on other companies to both design and build 787 components, in part to alleviate the burden of financing such a big project. But the extensive outsourcing led to communication snafus and delays.

Aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group said the lesson from “the great fiasco of the 787” is that it’s not just what you outsource, it’s also how you outsource. He said Boeing failed by giving outsiders too much responsibility for designing integral parts of the aircraft.

Still, Aboulafia said that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to divide the work — and share the cost — of building an aircraft. He notes that airplane makers always rely on outside suppliers to build engines, one of the most important components in an aircraft, and the system has been highly successful.

“You look at the companies in the world that kept it all in-house, and it’s more likely to be General Motors and less likely to be Apple,” he said.

Move to ‘lean’ manufacturing

The 737 production lines stretches down two sides of a building so large some workers use oversized tricycles to get from one end to another. On a typical day, the moving line of green-hued, unpainted airplanes chugs along at about two inches a minute, as workers install the thousands of parts that transform the fuselage from an empty shell to a flight-ready machine.

Employees work around the clock five days a week on multiple airplanes, producing 31.5 new 737s a month, with each 737 coming together in 11 days. About 9,800 employees work in the Renton facility on both the 737 program and the P/8A Poseidon, a military version produced for the Navy.

Rival Airbus produces 34 of its narrow-body A320s per month, and plans to raise that to 36 in December

It wasn’t always this way. In the late 1990s, after a crisis so great that Boeing actually briefly shut down the plant, the company began a drastic overhaul of the Renton facility.

Between 2000 and 2006, relying on the type of “lean” manufacturing principles pioneered by carmaker Toyota, Boeing made the gradual shift from building 737s at stations to running a moving production line.