Value Stream Performance through Collaboration

Learn how collaboration between customers, suppliers, and process owners drives increased value stream performance and customer satisfaction. This process starts with value stream analysis which is critical to ensuring a downstream customer focus from the onset. Northrop Grumman Newport News is driving this approach to ensure “measuring what matters” to the customer and eliminating metric warfare.

For more than a century, Northrop Grumman Newport News has designed, built, overhauled and repaired a wide variety of ships for the U.S. Navy and commercial customers. Today, Newport News is the nation's sole designer, builder and refueler of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and one of only two companies capable of designing and building nuclear-powered submarines. The company also provides after-market services for a wide array of naval and commercial vessels, and in November 2001, became a sector of Northrop Grumman Corporation.

With vast facilities located on more than 550 acres along two miles of waterfront in Newport News, Virginia, the Newport News sector employs about 19,000 people, many of whom are third and fourth generation shipbuilders.

Jennifer Boykin

Jennifer Boykin is vice president of process excellence for Northrop Grumman Newport News. Named to this position in 2004, Boykin is responsible for strengthening sector-wide performance by driving continuous improvement and standardization in all areas. Boykin’s focus is to use wide-scale employee involvement to improve the efficiency of cross functional business processes by identifying and reducing waste. Additionally, she is responsible for measuring process improvement opportunities and communicating progress.

Prior to this promotion, Boykin served as director of facilities and waterfront support with responsibilities for facilities engineering, waterfront and rigging services, construction and maintenance of company buildings, equipment and services throughout the 550-acre facility in Newport News. She joined the company in 1987 in the nuclear engineering department and has held progressively responsible positions, including senior nuclear engineer, program manager for the nuclear engineering division, and construction superintendent for the aircraft carrier program during construction of the USS John C. Stennis and USS Harry S. Truman.

A native of St. Louis, Boykin earned a bachelor’s degree in marine engineering from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and a master’s degree in engineering management from The George Washington University. She is also a graduate of the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce leadership program.

Boykin is a previous officer of the Hampton Roads Society of Women Engineers and she currently serves on Hampton Roads Partnership Board of Directors, Old Dominion University Engineering Advisory Board, and as a council member of First Lutheran Church in Norfolk, Va. She received the Newport News Shipbuilding President’s Model of Excellence award for leadership in 1997 and was recognized as an Outstanding Woman of the Peninsula by Girls, Inc., of the Greater Peninsula in 1999. She currently resides in Suffolk, Va.