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On the Record with
David Hess, President, Hamilton Sundstrand
Hamilton Sundstrand regards the Boeing 787 as “a defining program” for the company.
“The Boeing 787 has shown we can win with the arrows we’ve got. People in the past said we were at a disadvantage in not having avionics, but I don’t think that’s the case at all.” —David Hess, president, Hamilton Sundstrand.
Look out Honeywell: “We are looking increasingly at the business aviation market to see if there are opportunities for us there,” says Hamilton Sundstrand president David Hess. With its more-electric Boeing 787 experience and a clean-sheet approach to integrating systems, Hess believes his company can contribute electrical systems, air conditioning and environmental systems, and auxiliary power units — long the domain of Honeywell — scaled for the business jet. |
President David Hess sees it as evidence that the merger of Hamilton with Sundstrand five years ago has produced the leverage and operational excellence envisaged at the time. By combining the engineering disciplines across the merged company and offering integrated systems instead of components, Hamilton Sundstrand won eight of the nine major systems on the 787 — business that could total $8 billion over the next 20 years.
“Of those we won 7-0 against our toughest competitor” due to innovation in integrating systems, he told Show News. And of course there was the pricing.
“Our competitors said we just cut the margins. But in fact we are calling on an arsenal of weapons to get to the price point. Boeing set very challenging price targets, and we will get there through design for manufacturing, value stream mapping, low-cost outsourcing —and the other tools we are using to intensify our focus on operational excellence.”
Hamilton Sundstrand had been invited to bid on numerous systems for the 7E7: engine starter/generators, auxiliary power generation (APU), primary and remote power distribution and switching, and “cabin comfort” — encompassing everything to do with environmental and pressure controls for the cabin.
David Hess took over as president of Hamilton Sundstrand in January, crowning a career that began there 26 years earlier. Along with Ron McKenna’s office he inherited a portfolio “well packed” for the rest of the decade as a major systems supplier to the A380, Boeing 787, Embraer 170/190 and JSF fighter — programs that could generate more than $21 billion over the next 20 years.
“My job is not to mess it up,” he joked to Show News.
In fact his job is to execute those programs, while leveraging them into growing the overall business.
“We plan to double our aerospace business over the next five years,” he said. Growth will come from increasing market share and winning new business to generate growth in excess of that of the market itself, and from acquisitions.
The next major program will likely be the more-electric replacement for the Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 narrowbody airliners. “We’re doing technology and architecture already,” he said. A major challenge will be scaling the more-electric systems of the 787 down to the smaller narrowbody airliners; while systems will scale down, a starter generator is a starter generator and its weight does not reduce proportionally with size.
“We are anxious to win as much content as possible,” Hess said. |
It bid on them all, but also presented Boeing with an unsolicited proposal to integrate all the systems, saving weight and cost through simplification, reduction of parts, no duplication and using as many identical or similar components as possible.
For example, Boeing bid air conditioning and galley cooling as separate systems. “We looked at both, and found how to use galley cooling to assist the air conditioning at certain times by optimizing the heat exchangers. The result: we saved 300 pounds in weight,” said Hess. Several hundred more pounds have been saved on electrical and air management systems, he added.
Hamilton Sundstrand is also a major supplier on the A380, where it has a similar value of content to the 787. That program will be worth some $3 billion over the next 20 years. —John Morris
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