Improving the Customer Experience by Streamlining all our Technical Resources
Dassault Aviation’s Saint-Cloud headquarters has a storied history, including building fighter prototypes up to and including the Rafale—despite not being located at an airport. Saint-Cloud is its own small city right across the Seine from Paris.
Today, Dassault has corporate and design offices there. Until recently, it’s been home to the Falcon Command Center, along with additional hubs in Teterboro, New Jersey and Boise, Idaho, Command Center hubs move west with the sun to have fresh eyes on a problem around the clock.
The Command Center consists of a multi-disciplinary group, staffed by customer service engineers (CSEs), systems specialists and spares coordinators. They are ready to respond to all sorts of sudden customer issues, especially AOGs, whether it’s the result of an avionics failure or a bump in the night while taxiing or towing.
This group does amazing coordination work, as I discussedin my last blog about an AOG Falcon 8X in Minsk. Its job is to marshal the entire resources of Dassault to solve problems and to do so quickly.
To expand the Command Center’s capabilities, we decided to embed it within our engineering and production facilities in Bordeaux-Mérignac. In Mérignac, the Command Center team can simply walk over to the appropriate engineering desk for answers, or to the production floor to eyeball a system on an aircraft, or the Mérignac Dassault Falcon Service Center for discussions with technicians there.
It’s all about improving the customer experience, about returning aircraft to service quickly. We do this by bringing together all of the skills of engineering, production and support.
Just recently we had a 7X with an intermittent DFCS fault that was hard to diagnose—a problem resolved more quickly thanks to the co-location of all our resources.
In Mérignac, our CSEs coordinated with Design Engineering to develop a troubleshooting process and specific tests to isolate the fault. The Command Center arranged a time for the European-based 7X to fly into the Dassault Falcon Service facility in Mérignac, and the combined Command Center/Engineering/DFS team got to work, quickly identifying two troublesome line-replaceable units and returning the aircraft to service.
For the Falcon Command Center, it’s all about orchestrating the resources to rapidly address AOG or even non-AOG situations. With the new Command Center in Mérignac, conducting that orchestra has become better and easier.
Jean Kayanakis
Senior Vice President, Worldwide Falcon Customer Service & Service Center Network
Dassault Aviation
