Turbomeca Trips Up on Success Last Year;
Now Sees Strides in Customer Satisfaction

Success has been a bitter pill to swallow at Turbomecaand so has the wrath of its customers. "They are terribly disappointed with us, and we know we let them down last year," says Forrest Feiock, senior vice president for customer support at Turbomeca Engine Corp.

"But we have taken action on several fronts and they will see results," he promised, adding: "I wouldn't want to go through 1998 again."

Indeed, last year's success in engine sales caught TEM quite unprepared to look after not only a fast-growing fleet of new helicopters, but also a resurgence of flight hours and maintenance demands among its existing customers.

Caught with a half-remodeled facility at Grand Prairie, TX, a lack of qualified engineers, and a severe shortage of crucial parts as the airline boom strained the world's casting capacity, throughput ground to a trickle. The time taken to overhaul an engine stretched out to as much as 90 daysthree times the industry standardand TEM's rental pool of spare engines ran out, leaving some operators with aircraft on the ground.

Unavailability of spare parts accounted for up to 25 days of the delays, and Feiock believes the rest of the snarl-up was self-inflicted. "Turnover amongst our mechanics rose to 25% in 1996 and 1997, and we were faced with facility constraints," he told Show News.

Now TEM has taken the bull by the horns. "We adjusted pay scales, organization and structure, and saw a significant reduction in turnover. Meanwhile, we added over 30 mechanics in 1998, representing a 70% increase in personnel on the shop floor and in quality control," Feiock said.

The shop floor has been expanded 35% with the addition of 11,400 square feet, and it has been tooled and reorganized
to cope with high workloads. Turnaround times are way back on track, currently standing at 45 days and on schedule to drop to 30 days by April 1. Internally, the company is aiming for 28 days-better than the industry average, Feiock added.

In addition to overhauls, TEM assembles and tests new Arriel 2S1 engines for the S-76C+ helicopter. Plans call for 84 engine deliveries from Grand Prairie this year, compared to 46 last year.
Throughput of overhauled components is scheduled to rise from 33.6 equivalent engines in the first quarter of this year to 57.2 in the fourth quarter. "We have already achieved a rate we can sustain of 20 engines a month," Feiock said. In total, TEM plans to deliver 230 new and overhauled engines this year, compared with 116 in 1997. "That is nearly double. It is a huge increase in the amount of work," he added.

This capacity should more than cope with the annual addition of 60 to 80 Turbomeca engines to the North American fleet over the next couple of years. Today, there are 934 Arriel 1s and 200 other Turbomeca engines in service in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

A parallel effort has begun to recast TEM's service network, with plans to create by the end of this year at least two super service centers equipped with parts and tooling for deep maintenance. These third-party centers will be located on the East coast, and West coast or Hawaii, and will complement the support capability at Grand Prairie. That, too, will be beefed up 30% with a goal of five service reps in the field and four plus a director
at HQ.

These will all be available to assist customers in maintaining their own engines with new procedures that allow far more work on Arriel 1s in the field than ever before.

As part of the Grand Prairie expansion, TEM will relocate its second engine test cell into a new building, increasing test capacity by 60%. At present, setup work in one cell must stop while the other is running an engine.

By John Morris