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more than common through the smelting process. The steel is exotic, 9310 or H53 or Nitroloy. Very tough. Very tricky.
CHANGING A CULTURE
Henderson continues: “If I look at the performance of the two STC 1250s with the Fastem pallet system, fondly named the monster, these changed the game so much that now we just feed The Monster castings. I don’t know where we’d be if those two machines and that pallet system weren’t doing what they’re doing.
“It’s truly been the technology,” Henderson adds, “using the monster to feed the machines and the reliability of those machines. I’m not going to tell you that we didn’t work hard to get there. I had a lot of programmers work a lot of hours, a lot of operators on the floor that did some great stuff, a lot of rabbits pulled from a lot of hats.
“We’re changing the culture here. It’s like driving down the road at 60 miles an hour while changing the fan belt. With the huge spike in V-22 boxes, we still had to produce H1 boxes and commercial boxes — they couldn’t wait for us to get all the tape trials done and get the machines up and running. We just had to do it. We had to do this while meeting all our schedules, and we did. We knocked it out of the park”
SAVING THE PROGRAM
“Technology has made the difference,” echoes Rudeseal and cites an example. “We’ve had trouble with a supplier giving us the castings for the V-22 proprotor. They’ve been as much as six months behind. However, we never stopped the final assembly line. The only way we were able to do that is by not stopping at 100 cases. We’ve actually produced case sets in less than 30 days. We couldn’t have been able to do that with the old configuration, the old equipment. So, we were able to take being dealt a bad hand, and with great technology and the flexibility if affords, we’ve absolutely recovered to where the customer hasn’t suffered. We were late, yes. But they didn’t stop flying. The technology investment already has paid for itself: We saved the V-22 program.
“I’ll guarantee that had we stopped the assembly line for six months while we waited for castings, we would have lost our supporters, and we would have lost the aircraft out of the program. As good as the program has been, the government would have felt that Bell couldn’t keep up and couldn’t support the program. And two years ago that was the question: Could Bell keep up with the ramp? We proved we could, we were able to restore customer confidence. We saved the V-22 program, kept it alive and at Bell.”
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