The aerospace industry is facing challenges as never before: incorporating technological advances, ensuring knowledge transfer from retirees to the next generation and managing an increasingly globalised business are just part of everyday operations. Meanwhile, focus on quality and continual improvement must remain a priority.
Q: How does globalisation affect how you work?
Lloyd Barker, director of corporate quality at Alcoa: “Our downstream manufacturing footprint is set up to enable efficient connections with our global customers. The Alcoa model is to transfer learning and best practices of existing plants using the established knowledge base from technical networks, with Nadcap as a validation point. With global benchmarks, Alcoa sites all over the world end up at the same level, producing product and employing staff who excel.”
Kevin Ward, enterprise quality director for special processes at Goodrich: “Goodrich has 80 sites in 16 countries and employs 25,000 people around the world. The company has grown through acquisition and international growth. Incorporating many different cultures is an interesting challenge.”
Don Boulton, head of laboratories at Rolls-Royce: “We have an initiative called ‘One Rolls-Royce' which aims to create internal standardisation by creating global process specifications. These are based on the Nadcap requirements which represent industry best practice. For Rolls-Royce, one of the key benefits of global standardisation is the flexibility to manage the workload in a way that suits the company best. For example, if one site has a surplus of jobs and another has a gap in scheduling, work can be transferred between the sites with confidence because they both operate to the same high standard. This also increases our efficiency and ability to meet customer demand.”
SPRING Singapore and Vinnce Wu, manager, certification & consultancy at the Association of Aerospace Industries (Singapore): “About 120 companies are involved in the Singapore aerospace industry. These include major MRO and OEM players such as Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney, Hamilton Sundstrand, Honeywell, Goodrich and Barnes Aerospace. The Singapore aerospace industry has also seen many external investment activities in recent years.”
Q: Your organisation is actively involved in new programme development focused on skills and knowledge transfer. Is this an area of particular interest or concern?
Barker: “It's about discipline and process control and creating the right culture within the organisation. We wanted to share the knowledge that is traditionally reserved for engineers and metallurgists with the people at the working level who are responsible for the processes, like maintenance operators and supervisors. To address this, we decided to use eQuaLearn as our global learning centre and do the training virtually so that we can get the information to the right people at the right time, instead of fitting in with a class schedule. The idea is that, if more people know how the process is supposed to work, why it works that way and how to correct problems, any issues that occur will be identified quicker and resolved more efficiently.”
Ward: “Special process skills are being lost around the world due to an aging workforce. It doesn't seem glamorous to young people compared to something like software engineering. At the same time, the work is spreading around the world. We determined that there was a need to capture special process knowledge and share it for the benefit of the industry. Providing CPI falls within the remit of PRI, it made sense to use the organisation as a conduit. Through the pooling of our knowledge, eQuaLearn and eQuaLified were developed.”
Boulton: “Through our involvement with NUCAP, certain opportunities for improvement were identified internally. One of these was the need to improve our special process training. To generate this training for all the personnel involved in the approximately 150 special processes across multiple sites is a costly and logistical challenge. As a result, Rolls-Royce is looking at eQuaLified as an attractive alternative to meet this need.”
SPRING and Wu: “The Singapore aerospace industry has been growing rapidly at an average rate of 13% per year since 1990. To support and further this growth, it was necessary to nurture a strong pool of local companies. The MOU with PRI provides an excellent opportunity to raise the industry's process standards to a new level. In 2009, our collaboration has brought a series of aerospace quality and Nadcap related courses to Singapore.”
Q: Looking forward, what do you see as future key focus areas for your organisation and the aerospace industry?
Barker: “For Alcoa, it's about being competitive. We operate in a commodity-based market and try to be the most cost-effective solution provider. There are three elements to this: Energy: converting bauxite to aluminium uses energy so costs and efficiency are important; Technology: ensuring the technology used is reliable and efficient requires ongoing oversight; People: we have an aging workforce that also includes many new people. We need to bring the new people up to speed and make sure we don't lose the intellectual property established by those retiring from the industry. We are working with PRI and the rest of the industry to develop training and solutions for practical knowledge sharing so that we can continue to be successful.”
Ward: “The next wave of aircraft is expected to bring in a range of new technologies. At the same time, we are losing resource so the focus now must be to capture today's knowledge and pass it on to the next generation or we will find ourselves looking at a product in the future and not knowing what to do with it. Sharing our knowledge and harmonising it throughout the industry is the best thing we can do now for the future.”
Boulton: Rolls-Royce is interested in exploring the deployment of Nadcap accreditation into repair and overhaul. Meanwhile, as technology advances so rapidly, it is important for the Nadcap programme to keep up and adapt in order to remain relevant and valuable for the industry.”
SPRING and Wu: “We are convinced that our enterprises are looking into Nadcap accreditation to enhance their competitiveness and quality. This would give them a leading edge to support the growing needs of the aerospace industry. The aerospace industry in Singapore has already generated S$8 billion revenue in 2008, with 10% of this revenue generated from aerospace related manufacturing.”
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