Hi everyone; it’s Kevin. Today is Monday, January 2. Happy New Year—I hope you’re off to a good start and had an opportunity to celebrate the holidays with your family and friends. The New Year provides an opportunity for a fresh perspective, and today I’m going to talk about a new approach we’re taking to communicate our 2023 goals.
Annual goals help guide our efforts and connect each of us to our team members across Electric Boat. As I highlighted in our Year-End video, I’m seeing more collaboration and better teamwork across the organization, and I believe some of that comes from shipbuilders achieving a better sense of how their role integrates with others. To build on that momentum, the senior leadership team and I have adopted an approach our Navy and others use known as Commander’s Intent, or in our case, President’s Intent.
President’s Intent is a clear and concise expression of objectives and our desired end state. It’s less prescriptive than previous years’ goals and should give our directors and managers some room to maneuver as they make tactical adjustments while keeping the greater objectives in mind. It will be up to each department’s leadership to operationalize my President’s Intent so that your goals are clear, and you understand how your daily work ties to our company’s objectives.
For 2023, our priorities are Safety, Quality, Shipbuilding Velocity and People.
You’ve heard me talk about the need to improve our volume—how much we produce—and our velocity—how quickly we can produce, because it really underpins all of our objectives. Simply put, we need to build submarines faster. However, we won’t compromise safety to increase our velocity. Over the last four years, we’ve made steady improvements in safety and have done so with the youngest team we’ve had at Electric Boat in decades. We are making a difference by empowering people with the information they need to stay safe. That won’t change in 2023, so you need to ensure you remain 200% accountable for your own safety and the safety of those around you.
We’ll also increase our focus on building in quality, so no matter what job you do, you know going in what a quality job looks like. It’s up to you to build in quality; it’s not up to someone else to inspect it in for you. We build the most complicated machines in the world that are home to our nation’s warfighters, and we will always have a need for inspection. However, getting it right the first time means less rework and that increases our velocity. We’ll never put our inspectors out of business; rather, we’re pushing quality upstream in our process.
Our Core Values begin with “Value Each Other.” People are the bedrock of Electric Boat. Our family of shipbuilders is growing every day, and we must all lend a hand in teaching each other how to be better at our profession. If you are a new member of our team, learn quickly, ask questions and hone your skill set so that you can contribute your talent to our purpose. If you’re more senior, be generous with your time and teach others what you know. Your effort will create more hands and brains to lift the load and add value to our company and to our country.
So what’s our desired end state that ties to these four priorities?
- First, we want to achieve a fourth consecutive year of improved safety performance.
- Next, we want to sustain continuous improvement in our production quality across the board.
- Third, we want to deliver Virginia-class submarines—three of them in 2023: SSNs 792, 795, 797.
- We also want to regain our track on a 78-month Columbia delivery schedule.
- We need to sustain a 48-month delivery schedule for the USS Hartford, our maintenance and modernization work.
- Next, our business must meet its financial obligations for earnings and cash, what we refer to as our Operating Plan.
- We also desire our facilities and equipment to be materially ready to support the work ahead of us for 2023.
- We’ve got a lot of hiring to do, and we want to meet our staffing demands across the enterprise.
- I believe we are the best shipbuilders in the world, and so we set the standard by which all others are measured. That’s an important part of our 2023 desired end state.
For additional clarity and details on each of our priorities, and the end states I just described, we’ll link to Electric Boat’s 2023 Priorities in the transcript of this podcast. I also encourage you to reference our recently updated Strategic Plan which details our Key Business Objectives over a greater timeline, that is, through about 2027.
Folks, we have an enormous opportunity to deliver on our mission now and through the coming decades. As we move through 2023, please ask yourself these questions:
“Am I aware of my surroundings and performing my tasks safely?”
“How can I continuously improve my own performance?”
“How can I help my fellow shipbuilder?”
Thanks everyone—soon I’ll provide an update on our Incentive Program.
We’ll talk again soon.
Kevin
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