Technical Services Magazine • Fall 2006 - Northrop Grumman ...

Team NGTS
A Letter from the Technical Services
Sector President James Cameron
Driving to Be the Best in the World at What We Do
isn’t an easy Vision to achieve – but in our business
that provides critical support to our warfighters and
protectors of our freedoms – we can settle for nothing less!
During the 3rd quarter, Technical Services continued to make
significant strides toward attaining our Vision by winning competitions
with multiple competitors on several of our existing
contracts. Further, in the quarter we were also successful in
defeating the competition and winning new contracts, thereby
not only defending the critical base we have, but expanding our
reach into new areas!
As we all know, winning new business is a direct reflection
on how well one performs on existing programs. In order to
ensure that our performance obtains a high level of execution,
and continues to get better, we have as one of our key objectives
“realizing the benefit of a continuous process improvement
environment.”
You will note as you read through this quarter’s TS Magazine,
though we spotlight Training and Simulations, that all of our
business Groups discuss and promote process improvements
taking place throughout their organizations, which positively
impacts on our four other sector goals.
Specifically, being the best today isn’t good enough. We need
to be taking actions today that will not only keep us great today
in our performance to our customers, but will set the stage to
keep our level of performance unmatched in the future as well.
Making this happen can be seen as daunting when you hear
terms like Lean and Six Sigma being thrown around. In reality,
however, continuous process improvement is very simple.
Think about the times in your job where you have had the
“opportunity” to do the same thing more than once This duplicative
action is a non-value added step, and really is no
different that having to “rework” a part in a factory. That
“rework” is a lost opportunity to apply that time to other needs
of your customers.
Or think back to when you were “surprised” when the scope of
a task turned out to be dramatically greater than expected. That
“surprise” represents undesirable variability in our process and,
if left unchecked, can lead to continued inefficiencies.
The goal of a continuous process improvement environment is
to analyze all the actions that we take and first minimize, and
then eliminate, those things that drive redundant steps or tasks.
Further, we analyze our process flows and target areas with
undesirable variability; apply aggressive process improvements,
minimizing or eliminating variability, thereby providing predictable
results.
Achieving this end state, we remove waste from our business
execution process and enhance both performance and value to
our customer.
Through continuous process improvement, we will continually
raise our collective bar of excellence, which in turn impacts our
other stated objectives and significantly contributes to achieving
our Vision.
Thank you for your dedication, professionalism, and great
performance as Team Technical Services. Let’s embrace this
process of continuously improving at everything that we do,
while taking pride in the superior services we provide to our
great customers!
T S
The graphic above
complete with our
vision: “Driving to be
the Best in the World
at What We Do”
depicts the five strategic
objectives for the
sector that President
Jim Cameron set forth
in 2006. This magazine
edition highlights
Technical Services’
Training and Simulation
Group.
Technical Services Magazine • Fall 2006