This year marks Textron Aviation’s fifth year in its investment strategy for Europe product support efforts, which ramped up in 2012 with the opening of facilities in Doncaster, UK, Dusseldorf, Zurich, and Valencia, Spain. “I think that the brand awareness and the appreciation of our customers are there,” Kriya Shortt, senior vice president of customer service for Textron Aviation, told AIN at EBACE 2018.
To ensure a consistent level of service, Shortt explained, the investment in services and leadership in Europe should match Textron Aviation’s investments elsewhere. Early this year, she appointed Heidi McNary as vice president of European service centers, based in Munich. “I love to come to Europe,” Shortt said, “but she's here daily to be able to listen to customer feedback, have oversight over the shops, and make sure that we're doing the right things for our customers as well as for the shops to be efficient in support of our customers.”
Another new effort is designed to make mobile service unit (MSU) support more efficient. Shortt’s organization has hired 50 engineers to support MSU teams that are part of the 1Call support center. When two MSU technicians jump into a truck and drive to the location where an aircraft is grounded, the engineers assigned to that particular team dig into the problem and help troubleshoot. By the time the technicians arrive at the aircraft, they should know enough about the problem to implement an immediate repair without having to spend more time troubleshooting.
At the same time, the engineers share root cause information with the manufacturing side to help improve overall quality. “It helps them take care of our customers more effectively,” said Shortt. “[Operators] are leveraging the power of 1Call, and the process itself works. It is working for our customers and it [facilitates] the aggregation of data to be able to drive back into that quality system.”
This information is also helpful for aircraft owners and operators. “We're not saying there's a problem,” she said. “We're saying for you to be the most efficient operator, you should know things that people who have more hours on their aircraft have already lived through and you should benefit from the things we've done.”
The effort will roll out on the Citation Latitude shortly, then will be extended to additional models. “We’re trying to be partners with our customers by sharing information with them that allows them to be even more efficient in their operations,” Shortt said.
