When Eurocopter agreed to
transfer a proprietary application used in its industrial process to SPRING
Technologies, it strengthened a partnership that now makes a vital contribution
to its production and service quality.
TRUST
YIELDS RESULTS
“Our
partnership with Eurocopter goes back to the end of the 1980s and perfectly
illustrates the advantages that a major account can gain from trusting an
innovative, high-performance SME to support its industrial product process”, says
Gilles Battier, CEO of SPRING Technologies since 1994. Rewind to 1988, four
years before the helicopter division of the French Aérospatiale group merged
with the German Daimler Chrysler Aerospace AG to form the Eurocopter group. At
the time, SPRING (Société de Productique et de Recherche en Informatique
Numérique et Graphique) was still a very young SME that was growing alongside
the emergence of CAD/CAM (Computer Aided Design & Manufacturing). Its core
business was the development of custom software for major groups. Originally
solicited by the automotive industry, SPRING diversified towards the
aeronautical sector, when Eurocopter was looking for solutions to manage its
technical documentation. “The FTA (automated technical data sheet) project, led
by Marc Belluau and Jean-Luc Sturles, today at the head of Aérolia’s Méaulte
site in northern France, was on the wish list for the company’s production and
assembly lines. Its aim was to enable cross-corporate access to reference
documents very precisely describing the sequence of actions performed by each
operator.”