Earnings Call Excerpt
Innovative Solutions & Support Inc. (ISSC)
F4Q 2008 Earnings Call
November 20, 2008 9:30 am ET
Executives
Geoffrey S. M. Hedrick – Chairman, Chief Executive Officer
Roman G. Ptakowski – President
John C. Long – Chief Financial Officer
Analysts
Steve Denault – Northland Securities
David Campbell – Thompson, Davis & Co.
Alex Hamilton – Jesup & Lamont Securities Corp.
[Hyler Hilgo] – Fidelity and Co.
[Chad Treviso] – Aviation International News
Michael Ciarmoli – Boenning & Scattergood Inc.
Presentation
Operator
Good morning. My name is [Damechis] and I will be your conference operator today. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to the Innovation Solution and Support fourth quarter earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) Mr. Hendrick, Chairman and CEO, you may begin your conference.
Geoffrey S. M. Hedrick
Good morning. I’m Geoffrey Hedrick. I’m Chairman and CEO of Innovative Solutions and Support and I’d like to welcome you this morning to our conference call to discuss year end results for fiscal year 2008 and a forward look in 2009. Joining me today is Roman Ptakowski, our President and our Chief Financial Officer, John Long. I’d like to turn it over to John this morning to read our safe harbor message. John.
John C. Long
Thanks Geoff. Good morning. I’d like to remind our listeners that certain matters discussed in this conference call today including operational financial results for future periods are forward-looking statements that are subject to the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, either better or worse, from those discussed, including other risks and uncertainties reflected in our company’s 10-K which is on file with the SEC. I will now turn the call back to Geoff Hedrick, Chairman and CEO. Geoff.
Geoffrey S. M. Hedrick
Thanks John. Fiscal year 2008 was a challenging year with one with our major OEM business check program, the largest and most accelerated engineering development program in the company history. In addition, the program on the C-130 and Tristar flight decks with a European customer required very high resources, especially in engineering. The resource demand of these programs exceeded previous efforts by more than 50% and staffing of these programs required us to double the size of the engineering department during that year, adding program specific contract labor and working as much as 20% over time.
In the inherent inefficiency of large staff increases and delivery pressures resulted in very high spend rates and less than optimal productivity. As we completed these efforts, we reviewed both the tasks and the process to see how we could improve them in the future. These were lessons learned and that will prove most helpful in the future. The engineering department has instituted a number of improvements in processes and tools that profoundly improve productivity. Changes in these processes has defined scope accurately and minimized rework.
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