Production Readiness Room and Command Center Supports Manufacturing and Supply Chain Ramp

Nimish Gandhi: My name is Nimish Gandhi.

Jeff Gomes: I'm Jeff Gomes and we are in the Production Readiness War Room.

Nimish Gandhi: This production readiness war room is the place where we actually identify risk and mitigate risks by taking certain decisions and action items.

Jeff Gomes: Suppliers don't necessarily believe the demand; they've heard a lot of rumors in the past, so we have to prove to them up front that the demand is real.

Nimish Gandhi: This process is evolving, as you know the ramp up is unprecedented, so we've got lots of challenges ahead of us, but we have a good process in place.

Kevin Flanagan: Welcome to Flanagan Industries, my name is Kevin Flanagan. Our relationship with Pratt & Whitney is very strong; we are working with them on F135 parts, NGPF Parts, a lot of legacy parts. We're here; we're ready for the ramp up, and looking forward to it.

Doug Rose: I'm Doug Rose, I founded AeroGear about 30 years ago, and we specialize in making gear systems for the aerospace industry. We have had a wonderful relationship with Pratt, it has been very supportive, and just a great relationship.

Darren Bicknell: We're here at the operations command center at Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford, Connecticut. My name is Darren Bicknell; I'm director of supplier performance for Pratt & Whitney.

Mike Downey: I'm Mike Downey, I'm the manager of the command center.

Darren Bicknell: The command center here in East Hartford, along with the one we have in Canada and in Europe, tracks the movement of over 45,000 parts every day.

Mike Downey: You need to be able to predict, as far in advance as possible, where there is a delivery problem so you have a chance to react to it and solve the problem before the problem happens.

Darren Bicknell: What we're talking about here is not in a book, it's not theory, it's actually been in practice, and we see the benefits of mobilizing the organization off of a process that drives priority on the critical issues. Eighty-five percent of events that are identified at least four or five weeks in advance never become a shortage at all. We're going to continue to get better quarter after quarter, building off a record performance last quarter.