If your Embraer business jet goes AOG (aircraft on ground), you might get a call from the company’s CEO. Embraer Executive Jets CEO Marco Tulio Pellegrini recently shared how the company managed to climb to its number one rating in the annual AIN Product Support Survey. “It’s no coincidence,” he said. “I spend 30 to 35 percent of my time with customers [on the phone] to address AOGs. We are serving the customer in a different way to support the brand.” Pellegrini said Embraer Executive jets fields an average of 10,000 customer interactions per year, answers the average customer inquiry within seven seconds, has an answer to the customer usually within 15 minutes and returns 95 percent of AOGs to service within four hours.
Every time an Embraer business jet goes AOG Pellegrini gets a text message on his iPhone. A large electronic screen in his office tracks all customer AOGs in real time. “It shows all the AOGs differentiated by colors. If more than two days, red; one to two days, yellow; and the others in green. I don't want to see reds at all.”
Concurrent electronic messages are sent to various people within Embraer and its suppliers. Pellegrini sometimes calls the affected customer or the responsible supplier. “That's the reason the customer feels the result,” he said. “He doesn't know what is behind the scene. My goal is to improve reliability. It's not enough to be ahead of the competition. You have to reduce costs, reduce downtime and keep growing the fleet.” The size of the customer's fleet or the size of the airplane doesn’t matter. “A customer is a customer, and we need to serve these guys well,” he said. Pellegrini and his team also work with Embraer's 70 worldwide authorized service centers “to keep them motivated and providing the best service to our customers.”
Part of Embraer’s advantage emanates from the robust design of its aircraft, based on its experience with designing commercial aircraft, Pellegrini said, and that just naturally makes product support easier. “Our aircraft are designed to operate 1,200 to 2,000 hours per year with higher reliability. Traditional business jets were not designed with that kind of criteria. If the airplanes are more reliable, then I need fewer parts, have fewer AOGs and need fewer people to support them. Sure, the service centers get less business, but the customers are much happier, because they don’t need to stop a mission.” Pellegrini points to Phenom 300 customer Flexjet, which he said is currently flying its fleet an average of 1,400 hours per aircraft per year and enjoying a high dispatch rate.
“If you want to be the best, you need to be the best in all things,” he said. “You cannot be superficial to sustain a level of operation in terms of availability. While the Phenom 300 has the highest level of availability in one fractional fleet, I am not satisfied, and we can do better. So I met with the CEO to discuss what we can do in terms of pilot instruction and other things to eliminate the causes of what is keeping this airplane down. We need to stay engaged with the customer and the suppliers all the way through.”
Sometimes that means drilling down deep on a problem with suppliers to the point of annoyance, or changing suppliers altogether. Pellegrini recalled one case of a relief valve failing in flight. A thorough investigation revealed that the supplier “was cleaning the valve with fabric that released fragments that blocked the valve. That is the kind of thing we are doing. To improve overall reliability, you go as deep as necessary. Sometimes it creates a level of tension with the supplier, but once they understand, we have been very successful. You need to identify the root cause.”
Occasionally, Pellegrini’s monitoring of AOGs has led the company to switch suppliers and/or bring certain component manufacture in-house. “If it is a box, should we develop that box? We need to digest the technologies in that box. We go to the supplier with our engineer to improve the infant mortality of that box and get the lowest levels you can imagine,” he said.
Another important part of Embraer's improved product support performance was the result of its redesigned logistics system. “We improved the parts distribution and we improved the cost savings, Pellegrini said. “We redesigned our parts logistics and distribution with one hub in Memphis and the other in Brazil using Federal Express and DHL, with regional centers in Singapore, China and Brussels. It took two years to redesign the system. Our next-flight-out performance increased from 81 percent in 2012 to 93 percent in 2015. We reduced the average time it takes to move and ship a part from three hours to 45 minutes.”
