Avionics News June 2014 - 67

The Baron with paint by
Arizona Aeropainting
sits in front of Woodland
Aviation's upscale facility.

"man cave," storage, and gourmet
catering. For those unable to take advantage of Woodland Aviation's reliable luxury, the company offers quick
turnaround service.
Originally, Woodland Aviation concentrated on providing Beechcraft service. Later, it expanded into Cessna,
Cirrus and Diamond. As time passed,
avionics became a more-important
part of the business from both a customer service and sales standpoint.
Gary Pelfrey is vice president and
general manager. He has a Six Sigma
background with international manufacturing and experience in Mexico
and Eastern Europe. Applying his expertise to aircraft upgrades, Pelfrey
has found each one to be unique and
comparable to a prototype. Each job
is a custom job and requires plenty
of upfront planning. As the jobs became larger and more frequent, the
Woodland Aviation best practice of
collaboration also grew.
Traditionally, customers in the
general aviation industry have complained about communication. The
collaboration at Woodland Aviation
begins before the work starts and
includes the customer as one of the
collaborators. From the beginning,
the customer is engaged in the planning process and helps to develop
a timeline. Pelfrey will work as the
master scheduler - solving problems
so deadlines can still be met. The customer will get an abbreviated timeline
and a daily report. As a collaborator,
the customer will have responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is

to make decisions, and those decision
points are worked into the timeline.
As the type of upgrades Woodland
Aviation performed became larger
and more complex, the company
found developing partnerships to be

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a beneficial practice. The company
collaborates with several venders;
however, Pelfrey considers Aviation
Design, Arizona Aeropainting, Envision Avionics Panels and Ameritech
Industries to be "top-tier" vendors.
The relationship with these companies is close. Paul Coelho of Wood-

land's avionics sales department refers to three of these companies as
"our interior shop, our paint shop and
our panel fabrication shop." Although
these businesses are Woodland's first
choice, they all must still be competitive for meeting budgets and timelines. Coelho said that working with
them allows Woodland Aviation to
"perform the highest quality installs
in very short periods of time. Working with these shops have allowed
us the opportunity to focus on what
we're good at while increasing our
bottom line by streamlining the overall project." Pelfrey described how
the various companies "do as much
work as possible in parallel, which
compresses the schedule."
For Woodland Aviation, the collaborative process allows it to operate as
if it had a larger facility. Pelfrey speculated that with enough business of a
certain type, painting for example, it
might be beneficial to add those capabilities to the company's physical
plant. Still, just adding facilities isn't
enough. An advantage of teaming
with other companies is the application of expertise.
Continued on following page
avionics news

june

2014

Avionics News June 2014

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