Managers of Cobham’s 80 businesses around the world – used to life in one of the industry’s most decentralised corporations – are learning to work together.
The UK aerospace technology group is encouraging more co-ordination between its business units as part of a strategic review begun earlier this year. Until now, Cobham companies – many US former family firms acquired in a five-year spree – have been left to run independently, handling their own sales, marketing and buying.
After reorganising into six divisions in September, the Dorset-based company is appointing its first chief technology officer, head of procurement, and strategic marketing chief at corporate level.
It is an attempt to share best practice, procure more effectively and swap technologies, without “destroying the entrepreneurial spirit of the individual units”, says new chief operating officer Andy Stevens, who believes it will take up to three years for Cobham to reap the full benefits of the reorganisation.
“We have people running companies within the same division that have never met, let alone worked together,” he says. “There are a lot of technology synergies that we are not harnessing.”
But there are dangers in trying to impose a top-down model. “We want to provide support rather than direction from the centre,” he says. “It’s pull rather than push. These guys know their business and their marketplace inside out. The last thing you want to do is bombard them with process.”
The restructuring has seen Cobham – which will have sales of about $1.8 billion this year – move out of two markets: fluid and air pumps and flare-based missile countermeasures.
It sold its FR Hi-Temp and Stanley Aviation businesses to Eaton Aerospace last month for $270 million (Flight International, 29 November–5 December) and hopes to announce a buyer soon for its Wallop Defence Systems and FR Countermeasures companies.
MURDO MORRISON/LONDON
Source: Flight International
