Boeing Teams in St. Louis Receive State Quality Awards
Boeing (NYSE: BA) has been named a winner of the 2002 Missouri Quality Award, the state's official recognition for organizations that achieve business excellence. During a ceremony yesterday in Jefferson City, Mo., Gov. Bob Holden presented the award to the Boeing Aerospace Support organization based in St. Louis. Also during the ceremony, Gov. Holden presented a Missouri Team Quality Award to a Boeing-led weapons group based in St. Charles, Mo.
The Missouri Quality Award, given by the Excellence in Missouri Foundation, is modeled after the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Like the Baldrige award, the Missouri award recognizes an organization's success in seven areas: leadership; strategic planning; customer and market focus; information and analysis; human resource focus; process management; and business results.
"This is truly an honor and a tribute to our people in St. Louis," said David Spong, president of Aerospace Support. "It's also a measure of the progress we have made since adopting Malcolm Baldrige criteria as our business excellence model.
"We already are using feedback from Missouri Quality Award examiners to improve our organization, enhancing our ability to provide unequaled support to the men and women in uniform," Spong said.
About 1,800 people in St. Louis work for Aerospace Support, a business unit of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems. The St. Louis Aerospace Support team provides training systems and services; aircraft spares and technical data; and aircraft modernization and upgrades. Jeff Deckelbaum, general manager of Boeing Aerospace Support St. Louis site programs, formally accepted the award from Gov. Holden.
A second Boeing group to be honored at the banquet was the SLAM-ER Lean Pathways team, led by Boeing Integrated Defense Systems. The team received the 2002 Missouri Team Quality Award, which recognizes teams that have demonstrated exemplary processes to reach their improvement goals.
During the past 15 months, the Pathways team has been helping four key SLAM-ER suppliers implement Lean Enterprise principles and create roadmaps for continuous improvement to meet strategic business goals.
Sponsored by the Boeing SLAM-ER program and the U.S. Navy's Mantech office, the Pathways team includes people from Boeing, Mantech and four suppliers: Karsten Precision Inc. of Phoenix, Ariz.; Goodrich-Universal Propulsion Co., of Phoenix and Fairfield, Calif.; Kemco Tool and Machine Co., of St. Louis County; and Harris Corp., of Palm Bay, Fla.
"Both awards confirm our employees' commitment to changing the way we do business," said Ken Shead, Boeing Integrated Defense Systems vice president of Quality. "We are actively engaged in an effort to continuously improve our processes and our relationships with our suppliers. As we do this, we are also significantly improving our costs, delivery cycles and quality."
The Excellence in Missouri Foundation was established in 1992 to administer the Missouri Quality Award program and to promote quality principles in business, education, government and health care throughout Missouri. The program offers a thorough and objective educational process through which an organization can learn and apply quality implementation techniques and assessment methods.
A unit of The Boeing Company, Boeing Integrated Defense Systems is one of the world's largest space and defense businesses. Headquartered in St. Louis, Boeing Integrated Defense Systems is a $23 billion business. It provides systems solutions to its global military, government and commercial customers. It is a leading provider of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; the world's largest military aircraft manufacturer; the world's largest satellite manufacturer and a leading provider of space-based communications; the primary systems integrator for U.S. missile defense; NASA's largest contractor; and a global leader in launch services.
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