Frank Turner is melding together the best of the Swiss, British and Irish cultures at MRO organisation SR Technics
For a man who is supposed to have retired, Frank Turner is having an awfully busy year.
The one-time Rolls-Royce veteran headed Lucas Aerospace in the mid-1990s and then the engineering arm of British Midland Airways before stepping back from active management.
An advisory role to UK venture capitalists Star Capital and 3i, however, culminated in Turner becoming chairman of Swiss maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) company SR Technics (SRT) when they acquired it in 2002 and, in turn, to his overseeing the acquisition of FLS Aerospace in June this year.
At 61 Turner now heads the world's largest independent total solutions provider and, as he ruefully admits, the part-time chairmanship has evolved into a seven-day a week job.
The logic of the deal he brokered, which creates a player with $1.2 billion of revenues, was clear to Turner early on.
"I could see the strength of [SR Technics], but the weakness was that it was primarily Airbus. FLS though was primarily Boeing. It also had the UK charter carriers and was into the low-cost carriers in a big way," he explains.
"It had very high quality standards and a very good product. So it was a marriage made in heaven."
As newly-weds often discover, however, the challenge of making a marriage work begins after the ceremony. In this case the respective family backgrounds are Swiss and, on the FLS side, a mixture of British and Irish.
Turner says: "If you don't do things in the first 100 days of an acquisition then you don't change them. We took all the knowledge of the whole FLS organisation, but we also took the same knowledge base out of the Swiss people and spread it. We expect benefits from the different cultures - the Swiss being more conservative and rigid than the British and Irish, but if we can merge the flexibility of the British and Irish with the discipline of the Swiss, then we can do very well."
It is obvious that SR Technics' fortunes, once it extricated itself from the remains of bankrupt SAir Group, have been happier than those of FLS, but Turner stresses that both workforces have much to offer.
He says: "We are not going to try to change national characteristics. You have to make sure that, while preserving the national culture, you get every single employee bought into the vision and values of the company.
"It is as much a change for the Swiss employees as it is for FLS. They are becoming a global company and there are things which are done better in the UK or Ireland. We have to build mutual respect."
A programme dubbed "Be the Brand" is under way, part of which involves the two groups effectively auditing each other.
Turner explains: "They are meeting with each other and not just going and having a beer, but with a questionnaire asking 'these are the things that we want to know about you'.
"We have had meetings in middle and lower management in which the SR Technics people were amazed by what FLS people contributed."
Integrating the workforces will go alongside a fierce drive to integrate totally all other systems from finance to engineering.
"We now support 750 aircraft around the world and have $1 billion worth of notable assets," says Turner.
"Wherever any aircraft fails around the world then any SRT engineer anywhere in the world can see the history of the aircraft and if they don't know the defect then they can look up every other aircraft's defect and see what the fix was."
Meanwhile life goes on and Turner makes it clear that SR Technics intends to play a key role in the inevitable consolidation of the MRO sector still to come.
"FLS is not the end of the acquisition trail," he says. "We have positioned ourselves very well in Europe. There is a little bit more to do in Europe, but we need to position ourselves in Asia."
Turner insists that he does not know what exactly will be involved, but notes that the Chinese aviation authorities have a stated goal of implementing some of the low-cost airline sector's practices in the mainline carriers.
His strategy is built around leveraging the company's intellectual property rather than performing hands-on engineering. Heavy maintenance in particular is not likely to be grown beyond the current operation at Dublin.
More innovative deals, such as the current joint venture with EasyJet, are closer to the aim. "We will do whatever it takes with the customer," declares Turner.
"We have tough availability guarantees. They need aircraft day and night - it is a tough guarantee and we are beating it."
He expects to see growth at customers such as EasyJet and Dragonair of Hong Kong but definitely not at Swiss International Airlines which, in the SAir Group days, contributed 40% of revenue but is now down to 18%.
"We aim to have nobody contributing more than 12%," says Turner.
KIERAN DALY / LONDON
Source: Flight International
