Original Date: 04/28/1995
Revision Date: 01/18/2007

Lockheed Martin Electronics and Missiles is headquartered in Orlando, Florida with additional sites in Ocala, Florida; Pike County, Alabama; Goldsboro, North Carolina; and other U.S. and international locations. Part of the Lockheed Martin Electronics Sector located in Bethesda, MD, Electronics and Missiles maintains three primary product mission areas: Missile Systems, Fire Control Systems, and Advanced Systems. Varied technologies are key to these missions such as electro-optics, millimeter wave radar, image and signal processing, miniaturized and large scale ICs, and multi-sensor fusion. The application of these technologies produced over $1B in sales last year to Lockheed Martin Electronics and Missiles customers which include all U.S. military services and foreign nations approved by the U.S. Department of State. Over 5,000 employees occupy the Electronics and Missiles facilities that encompass more than 3,000,000 square feet.

The Best Manufacturing Practices (BMP) program frequently sees companies with focused programs in benchmarking and continuous improvement. It is less common, however, to find a company that has integrated the two into its own Best Practices program as did Lockheed Martin Electronics and Missiles in Orlando. The BMP program recently conducted a survey at Lockheed Martin and determined that the company’s internal Best Practices program was an outstanding feature that influenced all aspects of its business. In addition, that program received substantial support for implementation through its Integrated Product Teams whose objectives incorporated many Total Quality Management initiatives. These two Lockheed Martin programs produced significant results and provided pivotal support for the company’s 1995 ISO 9001 accreditation, the first for a U.S. aerospace company of its size.

Development of its internal Best Practices program is a response by Lockheed Martin to many changes and significant events, some dating to 1985. Although in-house continuous improvement efforts are not unique, this program is significant in how Lockheed Martin benchmarked outside customers, industry, and its own improvement initiatives and integrated them into a concentrated set of focused practices and metrics. It specifies initiatives, plans, and implementation milestones. This program is strongly supported by a high level executive advocate for each Best Practice area and represents the best of Lockheed Martin’s efforts to adapt to a rapidly changing defense marketplace.

If the Best Practices program is a highly effective process at Lockheed Martin, the company’s Integrated Product Teams constitute the critical element to its successful implementation. Another outgrowth of the company’s dedication to excellence and continuous improvement, these self-directed teams apply the concepts behind the Best Practices program. All Integrated Product Team members are stakeholders in setting performance goals, solving problems, and helping guide management decisions. They help distribute the workload, facilitate employee empowerment, and foster ownership, all key ingredients to productive Total Quality Management and best practices performance.

Like many defense-related industries and companies, Lockheed Martin Electronics and Missiles is successfully adapting to changes in the market environment. Continually benchmarking itself against the internal and external “best,” integrating what it learns in a closed-loop process, and applying conscientious efforts to produce high-quality products for its customer, Lockheed Martin Electronics and Missiles continues to produce practices such as in this report that are among the best in industry and government.

TABLE OF ACRONYMS:
The following acronyms were used in this report:

For more information see the Point of Contact for this survey.