In January, Air France Industries inaugurated its new component and equipment maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) facility in Villeneuve-le-Roi, near Paris Orly Airport. The new facility is nothing less than the company's spearhead in a strategy to address increasingly difficult market conditions. The entire $96 million building was designed to accelerate component repair cycles.

During a visit in November, Bruno Delile, director for hardware and services, gave Aviation Maintenance a straightforward but cogent explanation for Air France Industries's motivation for building the new facility. "Aircraft are increasingly reliable," he said, "and new technologies make repairing equipment more and more expensive, so we had to choose between leaving the market or repairing more aircraft to bring unit cost down." Hence the need for investing in industrial processes to boost productivity.

The focus is therefore on speeding up processes and reducing turnaround times. "Our targets are a reduction of 50 percent in turnaround time and 15 percent in production costs," project manager Patrick Gauchey told AM.

Air France Industries executives conducted a thorough review of existing facilities in the Paris outskirts. A possibility would have been to refurbish them, but the necessity for a radically different organization made the company drop this option. The new facility thus regroups workshops that used to be scattered around Orly but also features new repair capabilities. Most important, it has been designed to improve communications between the teams that have to work together, plus making operations safer for the personnel and more friendly to the environment.

"Since the inception of the Airbus A320, we have grown our customer base," Delile recalled. He emphasized the evolution, "from simple repairs to services that can be delivered anywhere in the world." Air France Industries now supports approximately 500 aircraft, half of which are for other airlines. "Our services are not only technical, they are logistical as well," Delile said. Pillars of Air France Industries's range of services are its workshops close to Paris airports, notably the avionics MRO facility at Charles-de-Gaulle that has been refurbished simultaneously with the building of the new facility in Villeneuve-le-Roi.

For example, the latter facility is a major supporter for a component service program that Boeing and Air France Industries recently launched for the Boeing 777 widebody airliner. Under the new program, the aircraft manufacturer and the maintenance subsidiary of the French carrier say their customers will benefit from reduced inventory, easier spare equipment management, and up-to-date components. The 777 Component Service Program is available at a per-flight-hour rate for dispatch-critical line replaceable units.

A new facility

In Villeneuve-le-Roi, the vital need for increased productivity must translate into technical, logistical, and administrative efficiency. In other words, quick invoicing and accurate inventory management are as important as sheer technical performance. In working out the facility's layout, the architect and the company executives made significant efforts to improve communications between departments such as methods, support engineering, etc. "We have developed a strong expertise in flow management, notably thanks to our information systems," Delile claimed.

When we visited the facility, it was nearly 100 percent operational. "We will be fully operational by year-end," Gauchey told AM, insisting the project was on time, on budget, and on specification. Fields of expertise available in the new building include avionics, pneumatics, hydraulics, surface treatment, and cabin equipment.

The project was launched in December 2000. Groundbreaking took place early in 2003. Last November, 800 employees were working at Villeneuve, 50 remaining to be transferred from neighboring Air France Industries sites. Total area is now 441,000 square feet. "Each workshop can be enlarged by 25 to 30 percent," Delile added. New hardware is valued at $18 million. For example, "the test equipment at our old facility in Orly could not match the Boeing 777's high technology," Delile explained. Yet, transferred material from other sites accounts for $54 million.

Air France Industries doesn't just support the aircraft its parent company operates. For example, Virgin has a contract for its fleet of A340-500/600s. In the military field, Air France is in charge of supporting the French Air Force's AWACS airborne radars and KC-135 in-flight refuellers. Also serviced are Boeing 737s, 747s, 767s, and 777s, Airbus A320s, A330s, and A340s. Coming soon is the A380 555-seater. And Air France Industries supports regional jets such as the Embraer ERJ 135 and 145. A possibility would be to add Bombardier CRJ support to the current offer, and negotiations are under way.

"Some 85 percent of our customers have signed up for a per-flight-hour or full support scheme," Gauchey told AM. At the customer's location, faulty components are quickly exchanged for working ones, which calls for a sufficient inventory at the Villeneuve-le-Roi facility. "Our new challenge is to reduce this inventory and still improve service quality," Gauchey said, hence the need for shortening repair cycles and easing every communication and relation between departments. "Some teams that work on the same process on a daily basis are now neighbors; some of them used to be half a mile away from each other," Gauchey said.

Efficiency efforts

Company managers wanted people to see and talk to each other rather than exchanging e-mails. Along the facility's circular "main street," painted in bright orange, are coffee-break areas, which play a critical role in internal communications, Gauchey explained. Similarly, open spaces have replaced most traditional, small offices. But, he added, "people were often reluctant to change to open-space configurations." To make them more acceptable, the company has invested in high-quality furniture. For example, seats have eight settings such as height, inclination, arms, etc. Depending on the level of concentration people need at work, dividing walls have various heights.

Surface materials on both the floor and the ceiling were selected for their noise-dampening qualities. "Anyway, people are accustomed to talking at lower levels now," Gauchey said. "In addition, we have provided our employees with high-quality telephones so audio comfort is as good as it can be." A number of conference rooms are available next to the open-space offices. Light quality has been carefully studied, too. Daylight enters the building through patios and 30 light wells in the roof.

Keeping comfortable

In terms of employee comfort, those who have to wear special clothes in their workshop had complained that these clothes sometimes gave off a bad smell in their lockers. Consequently, the clothes they were storing there during the working day were impregnated with this smell. The new lockers have two compartments, one for the employees' own clothes and one for their boiler suits. In the latter compartment, a ventilation system takes smells out.

Smart ways of improving communications and accelerating flows can be found in many places. For example, in the factory, the person in charge of "piloting" a flow of components can directly see his/her shelves. "This advantageously replaces some sophisticated functions in information systems," Gauchey smiled. In the same way, in the hydraulics workshop, test benches are now located in front of the people who repair components. They thus can see directly whether the bench is available and organize their tasks accordingly.

On-purpose constraints can also help promote good logistical organization. For example, the component reception area, where trucks unload faulty components and various goods, is relatively small. "This prevents us from having hardware in standby there," Gauchey said. He made it clear that boosting productivity relies on organization, not putting stress on people. "We focus on reducing turnaround times but we still do not want our employees to sweat more here than in their former factory," Gauchey said.

The cabin equipment workshop's layout features another way of boosting component work flows. The team in charge of conditioning compressed air into bottles is located just between its two "customers," the toilet bowl and airslide teams. Separately, Gauchey said, "we reinforced the ventilation to get rid of some odors and gaseous emanations from the cleansing products we use for the toilet bowls. This is something we saw after having started operations."

One of Air France Industries's activities in Villeneuve is airslide test and folding. Most slides come for scheduled overhauls. "Human errors on the apron sometimes result in airslide deployment and inflation," Gauchey said. Airslides have then to be tested and re-folded under strict procedures.

Most repair operations, such as that of flap-structure truing, are much closer to prototyping than series production. An exception are the maintenance operations on power drive units, small motors used for pallet positioning in cargo holds. "We perform 1,500 repairs every year," Gauchey said, "so we really industrialized these operations. This allowed us to reduce turnaround time from 18 to two or three days."

Friendly environmentals

An environmentally friendly industrial facility must be sober in energy use. Air-conditioning is available only in avionics workshops, the rest of the facility just being cooled. Solar filters on the windows participate in heat isolation in summer.

Again in terms of environment protection, some cleaning products have changed. "As much as possible, we have replaced polluting products such as white spirit by detergents, after having tested them," Gauchey explained. He noted that these tests were more than what was needed to convince those employees used to using white spirits and other hazardous chemicals.

Safety at work was one of the other important aspects of the facility's design. For example, around the main building, the employees' personal vehicles do not use the same roads as the trucks that carry aircraft components to and from the workshops. Similarly, compressed gases are stored outside the main building for safety reasons. The compressed air production and distribution system cost $8 million, Gauchey noted.

Noisy and dangerous machines are confined in so-called gray areas, inside the main building but delimited by thick walls. In the hydraulics workshop, the latter and additional soundproofing can bring a 120 dB internal noise down to 65 dB outside the room where fluids are compressed.

Simultaneous improvements in quality, personnel safety, and environmental protection find a significant example in the automated surface-treatment processes. Employees used to manually plunge parts into vats, which implied their standing just next to the vats, some five or six feet above the floor.

Robots are now in charge of the operations. This immediately translates into better safety and more precise repetitiveness in immersion times. In addition, water consumption is divided by three. For example, the second rinsing vat, after a certain number of operations, contains a concentration of the chemical product in use. It then becomes the first rinsing vat. More than $3.5 million was invested in this surface-treatment process.

Logical logistics

Internal logistics organization uses two schemes to optimize distribution of parts in the factory. The general scheme is based on a central warehouse. Automatic deliveries use pneumatic tubes. Those parts that are needed in one workshop only, such as electronic components, are stored directly in the affected room.

"Generally speaking, we are evolving from a job-based organization to a process- and product-based one," Gauchey said. Employees helped a great deal with this conversion. Right from the beginning, he said, "we knew we would have to adapt permanently. This is why we used a systemic approach instead of starting with too rigid a project."