On the Record With
CHUCK SUMA, PRESIDENT & CEO, THE NEW PIPER CO.

Piper is forging ahead with the design of a new family of airplanes despite weaker sales, says President and CEO Chuck Suma, and plans to deliver the first of them in two years. "A company that does not innovate stops growing," he says. "New products will be a decisive advantage in an upswing."

As a privately owned company, says Suma, Piper is able to continue the product development plans that were launched last year as part of its Flight Plan 2005 project. The development team is "a mix of people who have been in aviation, along with people from manufacturing companies outside aviation." Engineers have been recruited from companies that build trucks, motorcycles and even CT scanners-high-quality, complex, critical systems, notes Suma.

Piper will not disclose details of new airplanes until they are close to certification and delivery, says Suma. However, he says that Piper is planning a series of new aircraft to be released between 2004 and 2007, and that the company is focusing on ways to improve reliability and reduce the cost of ownership. Today's light aircraft, he says, "are akin to the automobiles of the 1960s and 1970s. For a tune-up, you ended up replacing the plugs, distributor and wires. Today, you go 100,000 miles and change fluids." Piper's goal is an aircraft on which "the 100-hour and annual inspections are just that-inspections."

The technology to reach that goal will include new powerplants and avionics. The new family of airframes will use high-speed machining and other current metalworking technologies to reduce the number of parts and fasteners and shorten assembly time. Piper is already changing the way that it builds today's airplanes to improve quality and reduce inventory, adopting lean production techniques, to prepare for the launch of new models. "Today's lines will be modified to cope with new construction technology," he says.

An essential part of the new product plan is PULSE (Piper Unlimited Liaison via Standards of Excellence), announced last summer in partnership with Siebel Systems. PULSE is an e-business network that manages all the information flowing between customers, dealers, service centers, parts suppliers and all of Piper's operations. "It's the driving engine," says Suma.

Before PULSE, he says, many non-critical maintenance problems were never reported past the dealer and were never fixed.

"A customer would come up to me and say that he has to replace a certain part every 300 hours, and I'd say, 'I didn't know it was breaking,'" comments Suma.

PULSE data will be used to guide development of the new family of aircraft.

Suma's vision for Piper includes not only new aircraft but a different experience for the customer. One of the company's exemplars is Harley-Davidson, which overhauled its products, its brand and its retail network and transformed its motorbikes from a blue-collar, counter-cultural icon into toys for middle-class empty-nesters. Suma has talked about turning spartan FBOs into more welcoming "training boutiques" and sponsoring and developing events that "build a lifestyle around the product."

Sales of training aircraft-a strong Piper market-have remained strong, says Suma, and there are signs that Saratoga and Mirage sales are recovering. The recession, though, has hit demand for the flagship Meridian.

"There's a psychological issue over $1 million," he says, "but the owners love them."

By Bill Sweetman