Report: Sharing is the future - DRAFT

Based on feature article published in ERJ’s November/December issue:

Hutchinson boss believes that cross-fertilisation of technologies is key to the progress of the French rubber parts manufacturer. Patrick Raleigh reports

Jacques Maigné, chairman and CEO of Hutchinson SA, a €4-billion turnover non-tire rubber products maker with a heritage dating back to 1853, believes in both in-house R&D and in sharing innovation across the group.

The Paris-based group employs 38,300 people and operates 95 industrial sites – including 60 in Europe, 19 in North America and 10 in Asia – and 28 technical centres around the world. About 50% of sales are in Europe, followed by NAFTA 25%, with the rest mostly in Asia and the company is second only to ContiTech in ERJ’s global ranking, by sales, of non-tire rubber product makers.

Up to 70% of Hutchinson’s business is from the supply of items, such as power transmission systems, engine mounts, sealing and hose products to tier ones and OEMs in the automotive industry. The remainder is in the aerospace, rail, oil & gas, defence and general industries: sealing, engine mounts, laminated bearings, fuel systems and thermo-acoustic insulation.

Rubber features in a large majority of all products, though the group is increasingly moving into plastics and composites – a shift evident in the group’s R&D programmes, which overall account for 5% of its revenues. Annual capex is currently running at around €140 million – up from €60-80 million in 2009-2012.

At a 7 Oct press event to mark the opening of the company’s new 507 Fabhouse innovation centre at its Chalette-sur-Loing, France base, Maigné said: “We are a multi-expertise company, active in many markets, the main ones of which are automotive and aerospace. We are involved from the beginning in materials, new materials, not only rubber. So a key point for us is to be multi-market with cross-fertilisation of technologies.”

The multi-strand approach, admitted Maigné, prevents Hutchinson from being the biggest player in any of its global markets: “Basically, we cannot invest in five product lines and be number 1 everywhere. But we are number 1 in one product line in one region, say NAFTA or Europe, and number 2 in some other product lines worldwide.”

Moreover, he said, the strategy leaves Hutchinson well placed to generate new opportunities, efficiencies and synergies through sharing R&D, technology, expertise and manufacturing capabilities across its five divisions.

This process is led from the top, Maigné explaining: “We have five business managers, who report in the performance of each autonomous division. But it is the role of headquarters to do the cross-fertilisation, and check that it is done well every day in all our domains.”

The set-up, the Hutchinson boss believes, is in tune with increasing market requirements for new materials and integrated parts with high degrees of functionality. This includes growing demand for rubber-based parts and systems able to send data for the maintenance and the management of equipment.”

Maigné also believes that by engineering proprietary materials, the company can better serve its customer and so tries to avoid using commodity chemical products, whether it be rubber, composite or thermoplastics.

“We are discovering new markets and new businesses for new materials, sensors and connectivity devices,” he commented. “So we are upstream we are downstream and we are doing this with a different way of management, a different way of working. The market environment is changing and we need to change our methods to adapt.”

Examples here include a new all-thermoplastic air-conditioning part for automotive vehicles, as an alternative to traditionally used designs based on rubber and aluminium. Based on a proprietary Hutchinson material, the component is already in production for two years on the Jeep Frenegate, and on the Fiat 500, and starting now on the Citroën C3 with projects on future JLR, Ford and BMW also in the pipeline.

Similarly, Hutchinson has developed an all-thermoplastics car door seal unit, with a thermoplastic elastomer seal as a light-weight alternative to one based on rubber with internal metallic reinforcement. The design, which saves 400 grammes per door seal, has already attracted interest from important OEMs such as JLR and Hyundai.

Another example is a very light thermoplastic air duct to be used on the new Airbus S330 neo engine. This is made from a fibre-reinforced plastics material produced only by Hutchinson and using a thermoforming process developed for an automotive part based on polyethylene foam.

“We start with a process in automotive and apply the same process with a different material for Airbus,” commented Maigné. “We do the same in anti-vibration with active systems for automotive and the US Navy. We share the materials capability.”

Another increasing aspect of Hutchinson’s development work is around the integration of materials and electronic technologies into products – a trend that is driving a move into mechatronics and connectivity systems.

Hutchinson has, for instance, developed a prototype to manage the maintenance of rotating units on helicopters. A wireless sensor monitors the stiffness of the rubber and sends predictive maintenance data to engineers at the end-user company.

And last year, Hutchinson acquired a start-up producer of a sensor designed to provide information on speed and acceleration in real-time. The technology can be used, for example, in steering-wheel applications.

“This real-time capability is very different from anything else you can find on the market,” said Maigné. “We did the acquisition for precision sealing in rotating applications. This is the integration of a new expertise.”

Emphasising Hutchinson’s progress in this area of technology, Maigné said “five years ago in fluid transfer, the OEMs gave us the name of the sensor makers to buy from. Now we do the sensors because we can do better integration of the sensors in our product.”

Shared production

Hutchinson’s technology-sharing approach extends to all aspects of its operations, including production.

“When we do a greenfield project it is for several product lines,” explained Maigné. “When the fluid transfer [business], for instance, wants a new plant in China, I ask them to go where we are already located. [Even if] it is a different activity but we can share the admin and all the fixed overheads, and we have already teams in place to manage the plant and sometimes to manage the workshop.

“And, if we have different plants and different business organisations between automotive and non-automotive we do moulding in both of them, we do extrusion in both of them and we have a group director of innovation in charge of cross-fertilisation.”

There are also, he continued, major savings to be made in R&D, by “sharing expensive equipment that individual units could not afford for themselves… and experts that none of our operations could have on board by itself.”

Asked about the future role of rubber in Hutchinson’s business strategy, Maigné concluded: “Rubber is not an old model. We [will] have to add some additional expertise, like electronics, mechatronics, sensors for sure and, maybe, have to make some partnerships with existing companies in these fields. We will go step-by-step: it is not a big movement for Hutchinson, it is incremental, not disruptive. This is the way we are moving.”