Will PrintRite3D assist P&W with those production issues last year concerning quality? I'm betting they will. I think our revenue numbers will increase a bit quarter by quarter as more AM machines get PrintRite3D installed in them with P&W's ramp up.
Leduc noted that, having had some well-publicized PW1000G production issues involving part quality (particularly of the larger PW1000G models’ hybrid aluminum-titanium fan blades) and late delivery of parts by some suppliers, Pratt & Whitney has beefed up its staff of supply-chain oversight managers. “We have 300 supply-chain pros we didn’t have a year ago to oversee the parts we considered at risk for [supplier delivery] commits,” said Leduc.
“At 120 to 200 [engines a year], we never went to validate commitments,” added Leduc. “We weren’t thinking about it a year ago. We were not as organized. We’re seeing a lot less of that this year and we have more warning” if any given supplier is in danger of failing to meet its parts-delivery promises. “We have that kind of granularity now.” While some parts-production and parts-delivery issues still occur, “they are normal, day-to-day ones”—issues Leduc classes as “Whackamole,” after the well-known arcade game in which players use a mallet to smack down “moles” as they pop up from under the game board. “But they’re not systemic issues.”
Additionally, said Leduc, “We have a strategy of ‘no single point of failure’ in our value assembly. I?n some cases, we have two or three sources.” All the ‘no single point of failure’ PW1000G supply-chain and assembly arrangements resulted from a P&W strategic decision to outsource 80 percent of parts production for the engines, where traditionally Pratt & Whitney has outsourced about 60 percent. “That’s different for us,” he said.
Admitting that “for some commodities we’re single-source,” such as the parts produced by lightweight metals specialist Arconic and by Precision Castparts subsidiary PCC Forged Products, Leduc revealed that “we do think there are suppliers out there, not necessarily large ones, that are strategic for us—and we’re thinking of acquiring them.” However, Leduc didn’t say whether Arconic and PCC Forged Products were among the suppliers P&W is considering.
Yet another factor which P&W reckons will help its PW1000G production ramp-up is that production of the company’s existing V2500 engine—almost all examples of which power A320ceo-family aircraft–will fall from about 500 units this year to “a handful” by 2019.
Will P&W’s supply-chain arrangements are being affected adversely by various airlines’ decisions to switch A320neo-family orders due to delivery in the near term to A320ceo-family aircraft instead, as a result of continuing low oil prices? Leduc said that it isn’t, to any noticeable degree. “We manage both programs,” he explained. “Our command center is seeing [supplier] commits, and as long as the capacity and manpower and raw materials are there, we have high confidence they will deliver, and for the most part they do.”
However, Leduc did admit the substantial ramp-down of V2500 production has slipped a year to the low assembly rate required annually for the Embraer KC-390 military transport-aircraft program, from 2018 to 2019. This is as a result of airlines either switching their A320-family orders or deferring them. “We did think it would be 2018, and now it’s 2019, but it’s still [going to decline to] a handful,” in 2019, he said.
Calio said Pratt & Whitney is confident it will be able to deliver from 350 to 400 production PW1000G engines this year, per the forecast it made early in the year. He confirmed P&W delivered approximately 70 PW1000Gs in the first quarter, “23 a month, basically,” which means that in each of 2017’s remaining nine months P&W will have to deliver an average of at least 31 engines—and at least 36 a month if it is to near the upper limit of its 2017 target delivery range.
“I don’t think there are any issues,” said Calio. “We’re on track to deliver 350-to-400 [PW1000G] engines this year. That’s 280 in the next three quarters [after the first quarter], and we’re positioned to do just that.”
Of necessity, this means that Pratt & Whitney is confident it has overcome the fan blade production-quality issues that led to the company having to reject some 70 percent of all the hybrid aluminum-titanium fan blades it and its suppliers produced last year. (Because of fan-blade strength and durability issues, P&W replaced the original hybrid-alloy fan-blade design for the PW1200G and the PW1700G, which share identical turbomachinery and are the PW1000G models with the smallest fan diameters, in favor of an all-titanium design.)
Calio’s confidence is due in large part to the fact P&W recently doubled its PW1000G fan-blade production capacity by opening two new production facilities, one at program partner IHI in Japan. Itpresumably will make all the fan blades for PW1200G production engines, as well as fan blades for other PW1000G models. The second facilityis in Lansing, Michigan. These locations have received “the benefit of our learnings over the last year, and they’re more automated” than P&W’s other two PW1000G fan-blade-manufacturing plants, said Calio, who added that the two facilities “continue to ramp up [to full production], toward the end of this year.”
