In December 2004, a manager at Raytheon Company articulated in the form of an LFM (Leaders for Manufacturing) internship proposal his belief that someone should do something about the amounts of time and money that Raytheon's North Texas plants spent handling expedite requests-requests that someone provide goods or services more quickly than normal. This thesis attempts to summarize the thoughts, learnings, initiatives, and outcomes associated with the ensuing effort. In particular, a large section of the paper is devoted to a case study of the most involved initiative: the devising and implementing of a new dispatching method in one small but central operation in an organization with a long history of processing things first in, first out. While for the project team the compelling factor was achieving a specific dollar impact, the reader of this paper will probably be more interested in the methodology than in Raytheon's ROI. Research for this thesis was conducted during a six-month internship with Raytheon Company's Space and Airborne Systems Supply Chain Management group in McKinney, TX, and Dallas, TX. The internship was affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Leaders for Manufacturing (LFM) Program.
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