After years of scoring last for helicopter product support in AIN’s annual survey, Airbus Helicopters jumped into second place just behind perennial winner Bell Helicopter. How did the world’s largest producer of civil helicopters advance so quickly and decisively after decades of falling short?
According to company executives, it all began with the annual video the company showed to all of its employees worldwide last year. “That video had about eight different customers from all over the world, including a few from the U.S.,” said an Airbus Helicopters spokesman. “In so many words, all of the customers were saying, ‘Get me the parts. Keep me flying.’ This was the first time that message was delivered to our employees in that way.”
“We got clear, precise direction from CEO Guillaume Faury,” said Anthony Baker, Airbus Helicopters vice president for customer support. Faury took over as CEO in January 2014. “Guillaume went out and talked with our customers. He listened to them,” Baker said.
Indeed, just months after rejoining Airbus Helicopters, Faury told an audience at the 2014 Heli-Expo convention that it was time for the company to develop “new priorities” and moved quickly to expand parts inventories worldwide by more than $100 million. Among the beneficiaries were the inventories at the company’s Grand Prairie, Texas campus and Dallas Fort Worth Airport distribution center, which were plumped to more than $110 million. “We looked at our fastest moving parts and we almost doubled those inventories,” Baker said. Last month Airbus Helicopters converted the Fort Worth warehouse and logistics center to seven-days-a-week operation from a Monday-to-Friday shop. “Our customers wanted to be able to access parts on weekends,” Baker explained.
The moves have already produced positive metrics, according to the company: On-time parts delivery has jumped 10 percentage points in the last 18 months, to 94 percent; the 24-hour AOG response rate was 96 percent in June, up from 90 percent a year ago; critical parts on back order have been slashed by 77 percent in the last year; and the commercial helicopter fleet availability rate is now better than 90 percent.
Tackling ‘Customer Irritants’
However, the company concedes it still has more to do. Company-wide, Airbus Helicopters is instituting new process training for its employees. The training teaches employees how to analyze problems systematically and attack them at the root cause with corrective processes, as opposed to constantly being in a reactive “putting out the fires” mode. The training teaches employees how to be more customer-focused and solution-oriented. Faury and his top executives took the training first before introducing it to the rest of the company.
Airbus Helicopters is also honing predictive tools such as the data analytics that plug directly into customer enterprise resource planning systems to foresee customer needs and unscheduled maintenance events, and the reasons for them. The company is also hiring more customer support managers (CSMs) who work with select customers to analyze the causes of unscheduled maintenance, recommend solutions and use the data to shape the design of future products. CSMs also help customers balance and make the most of their parts inventories.
In Grand Prairie, Airbus Helicopters is developing onboard health usage and monitoring systems capability for its light singles and light to medium twins. “This will help customers do predictive maintenance,” Baker said, adding that the system is scheduled to be rolled out next summer for the first model. The prototype device weighs just seven pounds, Airbus Helicopters spokesman Bob Cox said, and is now undergoing dynamic testing. At present the data is offloaded from the helicopter on the ground via a wireless app on a smart device and also transmitted to Airbus Helicopters for analysis.
The company is reviewing all of its scheduled maintenance requirements, beginning with the H130. “We are trying to spread out the scheduled maintenance tasks so that the customer is not doing a heavy inspection at the same time it is doing a 12-year inspection. We hope to have the revised plan done by the end of this year,” Baker said.
Implementing customer suggestions more quickly is another goal for the company. It recently formed customer focus groups and has conducted meetings with them in an effort to measure customer sentiment and receive data from them. The company planned to hold the first customer focus group meeting in the U.S. last month at its plant in Columbus, Miss., attended by senior company executives. From those meetings, Airbus Helicopters will devise a list of what Baker calls the “top five customer irritants” and commit to solve them through the company’s product support office. Top company executives, including Faury, review the list monthly.
Airbus Helicopters is also revamping its hourly maintenance plans to make them more attractive to customers, Baker said. The traditional “buy-in” for owners of used helicopters will be eliminated, and the company plans to roll out an aggressive marketing campaign for these plans in the coming months. Baker said Airbus Helicopters is also moving to strengthen its relationship with its authorized service centers and helping them improve quality where indicated and to raise U.S.-manufactured content on its aircraft where practical.
“We’re taking all of the changes customers have asked for seriously,” Baker said. “We still have a lot to do. The challenges are still there.”