We are all familiar with the numerous trendy buzz words that come in and out of fashion in the business world. One phrase that has demonstrated some staying power is "Continuous Improvement". While many companies banter this phrase about to market how cutting edge their quality system is, it is not always very evident how, or even if, they put this concept into practice.

While we do many things well, in some areas there are obvious needs for improvement. In any case, there is no such thing as good enough. Everybody who is paying attention, whether in aerospace or any other industry knows that to be successful you have to strive relentlessly to get better in everything you do. We understand this very well. But saying this is not enough. Actions do speak louder than words; and from our customers' point of view, I'm sure they would say that results speak even louder than actions. Ultimately, it is clearly the results that our customers are interested in.

What really matters is that we understand our customer's requirements; that we operate effectively and efficiently; that we communicate often and well; that we deliver our products and services on-time, every time; and that we complete the job to our customer's full satisfaction. On all of these counts we will continually improve our performance.

We recently conducted our quarterly planning process. This brought focus to what we need to be doing now to make progress toward fulfilling our customer-focused mission and our improvement objectives. In his article, Mike Gilchrist explains the Leaning process. The priorities we established this quarter include "Leaning" our engineering design process, improving our project management process and conducting our next significant lean event in manufacturing. Rob Michell discusses the continuous improvements we are making in engineering.

The purpose of Leaning our engineering design process is to significantly reduce the time from receipt of our customer's order to design completion. This period is the biggest driver for overall project lead time reduction and on-time delivery performance improvement. Improving our project management process is a lot about communication, both internal and external. With further process improvements, we intend to establish a closer link to our customers to ensure that we are together every step of the way through the project.

Regularly planned and scheduled Lean events in manufacturing keep us on track to achieve ongoing improvements to reduce costs and to shorten process times, which relate directly to enabling us to be more competitive and more responsive to our customer's needs. Andrew Parfitt talks about our improvements in Sales to help us address our customers' needs better.

We are keeping score and holding ourselves accountable for these improvements. We clearly understand that this is exactly what our customers are expecting of us, just as they are doing the same in their operations. As we are making significant strides this quarter, we will look forward to continuing the process next quarter, and every quarter thereafter.