TRW Wins NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Contractor Excellence Award
TRW
has been selected to receive the 2000 Contractor Excellence
Award in the Large Business/Product category by NASA’s Marshall Space
Flight Center (MSFC), Huntsville, Ala.
The award is presented annually to recognize outstanding product
and service contributions made by contractors to the Marshall Center.
Contractors are rated on a number of criteria, including customer
satisfaction and contract technical performance; schedule performance;
cost performance; management initiatives responsive to MSFC’s
strategic goals; leadership and continuous improvement; and innovative
technology breakthroughs.
TRW was recognized for its disciplined, collaborative approach to
helping MSFC fulfill requirements on a number of significant MSFC
programs and initiatives over the past few years.
Among the successes cited were TRW’s leadership of the team that
designed, built, integrated and tested NASA’s Chandra X-ray
Observatory; the company’s ongoing focus on customer satisfaction and
process improvements; and its significant contributions to MSFC’s base
of propulsion technology.
“This award is a tribute to the dedication and commitment of TRW’s
employees to meeting and exceeding the expectations of their
customers,” said Timothy W. Hannemann, executive vice president and
general manager, TRW Space & Electronics Group. “Our focus on quality,
process improvement and customer satisfaction is at the core of a
40-plus year partnership with NASA that has produced some of the
nation’s most significant successes in space.”
Central to TRW’s success, he added, has been its widespread
adoption and use of ISO-9001-approved standards and processes.
More significantly, explained Hannemann, capturing the MSFC
Excellence Award places TRW in contention to win NASA’s 2001 George M.
Low Excellence Award for Quality and Productivity, the space agency’s
highest award for organizational quality and excellence. Results for
the 2001 Low Award competition are expected to be announced in spring
2001.
The MSFC Excellence Award cited TRW not only for its engineering
and management contributions to missions such as Chandra, but for its
innovative approach to improving the processes and technologies used
to define, plan and execute future missions.
For example, the company has replaced 30 costly, disjointed
processes with a single ISO-approved system, resulting in a 46 percent
reduction in the cost of processing purchase orders. It has also
streamlined the processes used to acquire high reliability parts,
reducing typical cycle times by a factor of four.
On the technical side, TRW has produced dramatic breakthroughs
with its propulsion technology. Its highly efficient Advanced
Columbium Liquid Apogee Engine, developed and used successfully to
raise Chandra to its final highly elliptical orbit, is now a
space-proven technology ready for insertion in commercial and
scientific spacecraft.
And TRW’s low-cost, booster-class pintle rocket engine, which the
company has been developing in collaboration with MSFC, has the
potential to slash launch vehicle engine costs by more than 50
percent.
TRW has been designing and producing spacecraft systems for NASA’s
most challenging missions since 1958. Based in Cleveland, Ohio, the
company provides advanced technology products and services for the
global automotive, aerospace, telecommunications and information
systems markets. TRW news releases are available on the corporate Web
site: http://www.trw.com.
