Though many of Pratt & Whitney’s geared turbofan (GTF) suppliers continue to miss production targets, company executives remain confident the engine maker is prepared for a massive planned ramp up in production.
Gregory Hayes, chief executive of P&W parent United Technologies, tells reporters on 6 June that 44% of P&W’s roughly 1,600 GTF suppliers are “under-performing”, meaning they are not hitting production, delivery and cost targets.
Still, Hayes insists that P&W is on track to meet a production surge that calls for GTF deliveries reach 1,200 annually by 2020.
“On the execution front, I feel very good about where we are on the aerospace side,” says Hayes. “Very confident.”
The Connecticut-based engine maker has received a whopping 7,100 orders for GTFs, which power Airbus A320neos, Embraer E-Jet E2s, Mitsubishi Aircraft MRJs, Bombardier CSeries and Irkut MC-21s.
P&W assembles GTFs at US sites in Connecticut and Florida, and in Montreal.
The company expects to deliver about 200 GTFs this year, the vast majority being PW1100Gs, which power the A320neo family.
But it expects deliveries to double to 400 in 2017, then hit 600 in 2018 before reaching the 1,200 mark by the end of the decade – a production ramp up second only in pace to P&W’s surge during the Second World War, say executives.
“It’s a huge ramp. Unprecedented,” Hayes says.
He made his comments during a two-day media event during which executives answered questions about P&W’s supply chain issues, and explained mitigation measures.
“One of the big challenges we have at UTC is quality and delivery consistency from our suppliers,” P&W senior vice-president of operations Danny Di Perna tells reporters. “Supplier quality is a challenge, not just for us.”
He stresses that supplier issues are not affecting engine quality and that about half of GTF suppliers are indeed meeting P&W’s targets.
Suppliers provide about 80% of the materials that make up GTFs, Di Perna says, adding that such a large supply chain is “difficult to manage”.
But Di Perna says he is frequently on the phone with problem suppliers, and companies that don’t meet P&W’s production goals face the prospect of being dropped.
“For the most part, our suppliers respond,” Di Perna says. “For the most part, all of them are investing very heavily now.”
He also notes that P&W designed its GTF supply chain with redundancy. It’s a “no-single-point-of-failure” strategy that costs more and adds complexity, but “will pay off in spades”, Di Perna says.
The company’s supplier costs will hit about $4 billion this year, climbing as high as $7 billion annually by the end of the decade, says Di Perna.
P&W also had problems with a UPS-run logistics centre in New Hampshire, where engine parts are staged, kitted and shipped to assembly sites.
In August 2015, the site suffered a one-month work stoppage due to “start-up issues”, costing P&W $500 million in lost revenue, the company has said.
But those problems have been fixed, P&W president of commercial engines Greg Gernhardt tells Flightglobal.
“The UPS logistics centre, right now, is executing flawlessly,” he says. “The only way we are going to produce this many engines is to have that distribution centre.”
Meanwhile, P&W continues to invest in its own infrastructure and is hiring additional machinists, engineers and assembly workers.
The company already spent $600 million to $700 million on manufacturing and testing improvements and expects that investment to increase to $1.3 billion within five years, says Di Perna.
P&W has also transferred about 200 engineers – workers who designed specific GTF parts – into roles that support manufacturing and supply of those parts, adds Gernhardt.
“We are confident we can do it,” Gernhardt says of the planned production surge. “We have the infrastructure.”
Source: Cirium Dashboard
