Barnes Aerospace President Patrick Dempsey

© Photos courtesy of Barnes Aerospace

Barnes Aerospace, a Windsor, Conn.-based company, started through acquisition. The current corporate parent bought two businesses in 1981 and 1982, Central Metal Products and Windsor Manufacturing. It then bought Jet Die and Engineering of Michigan in 1986 and Flameco Engineering of Utah in 1988.
Together the purchased firms became Barnes Aerospace, the third segment in Barnes Group Inc. It joined Barnes Distribution—a distributor of maintenance, repair and production supplies—and Associated Spring, one of the largest spring manufacturers in the world. All told, the three business units today employ more than 6,600 within 65 locations worldwide.
The group also holds a single-letter NYSE ticker symbol, B, which it obtained when it went public in 1963.
Acquisitions sometimes raise nervous eyebrows among industry watchers. Could new management bring more trouble or a fresh perspective to these different aerospace companies?
After more than two decades, it's now safe to say the latter. Barnes Aerospace has gone through a carefully planned diversification both within the OEM aerospace business as well as the aftermarket, served primarily through a business unit called Windsor Airmotive. Beyond locations acquired in the 1980s, the company now operates facilities in Ohio, Arizona, the U.K.—and Singapore, serving a rapidly expanding Pacific-Rim customer base.
Like at many manufacturers who survived the downturns over the past decades, management consistently questioned its value propositions and, ultimately, greatly expanded them.
This, say company sources, led to diversification and financial health. As a whole, the three Barnes segments produced net sales of $1.3 billion in 2006, up 14 percent from prior-year results. According to company releases, all three business units experienced double-digit growth. To top it off, 2006 fourth-quarter profit nearly doubled from the prior year.
And so, at present, Barnes Group Inc.'s financials seem to say the company is doing something right.

Steps toward Diversifying Two decades ago the aerospace business unit focused on high-end machining VMC-2100AG of conventional steels and aluminums as well as exotic alloys, from Inconel and Hasteloy to titanium. That core competency "was our initial acquisition target," explains Barnes Aerospace President Patrick Dempsey. From there, management saw the long-term trends within the aerospace market. A preferred supplier couldn't thrive without at least some design-for-manufacturability competency. "We began with a strategy to leverage our initial set of core competencies [in aerospace machining] to fill the needs of a niche market, and have expanded that to employ a differentiated strategy whereby the products and services we offer today are very complex and highly engineered," he says. After acquiring the businesses in Utah and Michigan, along with initiating significant organic growth, the company had garnered a range of manufacturing processes, from milling, turning, electro-discharge machining and creep-feed grinding to sheet-metal fabrication processes such as superplastic forming, hot forming, laser cutting, welding and brazing. "The fabrication business allowed us access to a different set of customers and end markets," Dempsey says. "The initial machining business primarily focused on the engine OEMs—Pratt & Whitney, Rolls-Royce and General Electric. When we diversified into the fabrication business, we expanded our portfolio to also include airframe components. It was then we started to provide manufacturing services directly for Boeing and Airbus."

Move to the Aftermarket

Over time, the company experienced wide swings in demand for its new manufacturing services. A plan was needed—and this ultimately led to the aftermarket.
Barnes Aerospace's aftermarket business focuses on high-end refurbishments to jet-engine components. "The move gave a 'dampening effect' to the historical cyclical nature to the new-manufacturing business," Dempsey says. "The aftermarket had a different set of characteristics that complemented our strategy of overall diversification."
The aftermarket experiences more consistent annual growth rates, since commercial airlines continue to fly regardless of the economic climate. And the need for maintenance becomes obvious when considering the world's aging air fleet. According to the Academic Center for Aging Aircraft, more than 80 percent of all aircraft are more than 10 years old, and more than 40 percent are over 20 years old.
Barnes Aerospace picked the low-hanging fruit first. The company leveraged its expertise in engine manufacturing, with large-scale metal-cutting and creep-feed grinding work. To grow the business, though, required expanding its core capabilities to not-so-common processes: thermal spray, electron-beam welding, waterjet stripping and the like.
Though the aftermarket isn't subjected to the same cyclic conditions, the business isn't immune to globalization. News of carriers flying planes to South America and elsewhere for routine maintenance may present a harbinger of the industry's future state, even for advanced repairs.
To compete, Barnes Aerospace keeps ahead of the technological curve. "Many times, we develop repairs that were not previously in existence," Dempsey explains. "Our engineers develop the repair techniques, and we ensure that processes used will meet both engineering and quality requirements that will be accepted by the industry."
Consider jet-engine casings subjected to tremendous stresses and heat over time. The resulting fractures may have scrapped these components in the past. Yet today, Barnes Aerospace uses advanced welding processes—like automatic gas-tungsten-arc or electron-beam welding—to complete section replacements on the casings. In some instances the company applies a subsequent thermal-spray process that adds a thermal barrier coating that can make the case "more resilient in service than the original part," Dempsey says.

The company has also worked to secure its business partnerships in the aftermarket. This year, for instance, Barnes Aerospace finalized another revenue-sharing deal with General Electric that allowed Barnes to become the exclusive supplier of aftermarket parts for the CFM56 and CF6 jet-engine families.


© Photos courtesy of Barnes Aerospace

Engineering R&D

Such expansion, explains Dempsey, wouldn't have been possible without extensive in-house research and development. The company has its own R&D laboratory, with a Ph.D. metallurgist on staff, along with Materials Control Laboratories at several sites. The entities serve multiple functions. They perform metallurgical evaluations of new manufacturing techniques, provide in-process production control, assist with root-cause analysis for various manufacturing or production problems and help test and validate processes for new jobs.
More significantly, it gives extra support for Barnes Aerospace engineers to partner with customers at the earliest stages of product design. "If you go back to the 1980s, most if not all of the design took place at the OEMs," Dempsey says. "They were very much self-contained and self-sufficient. But as time progressed, I think major suppliers within the industry ... saw how [they] could add engineering value to complement manufacturing core competencies and offer these services to customers. This has led to a new era of outsourcing within the entire supply chain." The aerospace business, he adds, has evolved into a transparent environment where close partnerships create better products.
Concludes Dempsey, when the walls between design, concurrent engineering and manufacturing become transparent, efficiencies abound.
Editor's Note: Photos courtesy of Barnes Aerospace, www.barnesaero.com.

from Farbrication & Metalworking
May 2007 • Vol.6, Issue 5