The aircraft maintenance professional's source for technological advancements, maintenance alerts, news, articles, events, and careers
Issue link: http://amt.epubxp.com/i/954735
"Every time we build up technology it requires that we're ready for it by having access to material, IP and the market supports it. So, it's kind of a complex chain of events that allows us to build up the technology. And because LTCS grew organically, it has implemented the company's best practices and has had a lot of support from its colleagues in Hamburg and also the APAC region. As part of the lean program architecture that has built up, Lufthansa Technik tries wherever possible to implement the same processes in all its facilities. At the moment, we're running a different enterprise resource planning (ERP), but we're in the process now to change over to the LHT operating system," Fondell says. "I would say that our growth in shop load events hasn't reached what we had hoped for initially, but this is not because of a failure of some kind," he says. "I think the expansion project itself took a little longer to launch due to a variety of reasons, so the platform wasn't necessarily there to reach the growth that we intended. That said, we still in 2017 over 2016 increased the shop load events by 25 percent. So, it's a substantial growth and we look for a figure also in the 20 percent range in 2018. "Overall I would say that the component division in the Americas is growing substantially faster than the market," Fondell says. "That was our target and we continue to do that." The growth in the Americas is not exclusive to the component division. "In the last couple of years, we've increased our sales footprint with the office in Miami, built up base maintenance in Puerto Rico (See Break Ground for Aviation, AMT January/February 2015, www.aviationpros.com/article/1203031) and added to our engine capability in Tulsa as well." "That's of course part of the strategy especially in the regions," says Wolfgang Reinert. "The U.S. market and the Asian market are growing the most in aviation and that's also following our business. That's where we, in our position as one of the international market leaders, would like to be to plant our footprint and it's also the target in all the other areas of what we are offering: Just to grow with the market and to be on top of the technical evolution." TOP: THE new test cell for high flow. THE NEW slides repair shop in Tulsa.