PHOTO RELEASE--Ingalls Shipbuilding Employees Honored With President's Awards for Excellence

PASCAGOULA, Miss., March 17, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Huntington Ingalls Industries' HII Ingalls Shipbuilding division has honored six teams and three individuals with "President's Awards for Excellence" for their outstanding and innovative work on shipbuilding projects.

"We build some of the most complex, technologically advanced products in the world," said Ingalls Shipbuilding President Irwin F. Edenzon. "We need men and women who are innovative and engaged in their work. The individuals and teams honored this year exemplify these attributes."

Each year, Ingalls presents the President's Award for Excellence to shipbuilders for their outstanding contributions in the areas of innovation and technology, customer satisfaction and operational excellence.

A website featuring photos of all the award-winners is available here: http://ingalls.huntingtoningalls.com/events/ipa/index

The 2014 recipients are:

David Dixon
Dixon led a team that hired and trained hull department leaders to fill leadership roles in various shops. He also made and met his commitment to improve cost and schedule performance in those shops. Dixon has worked diligently with production control to establish target rates for these areas and helped develop the reporting tool used to track production and schedule in the shops.

Brad Mason
Mason leads AMSEC's maintenance, modernization and technical services operation, where he developed and implemented a recovery plan on a schedule discrepancy involved with work on the guided missile destroyer USS Laboon (DDG 58). Mason's plan not only vastly improved schedule performance, it also improved communication and trust with the customer and all parties involved.

Michael Porter
Porter provided training on the inverted paper timekeeping process for 7,500 craft workers and craft foremen in 2013. He was also instrumental in developing the process and communicating it to the shipyard's leadership teams. His work in the pilot training, control group training and general population training ensured the success of the new process.

Pipe Welding NDT Rates Team
Dirul-Islam Burrus, Danny George, Mike Jordan, Bryan Manson Sr., Sid Reus, Jason Rushing and Dennis Woodard
Utilizing a special team from pipe and non-destructive test (NDT) departments, the team was able to reduce pipe welding NDT reject rates to less than 1 percent. This was accomplished through careful analysis and testing.

LPD 26 Rudder Horns Team
Joshua Box, Clayton Clements, Jay Hunt, David McDonald, Ronnie Walters and Warrick T. Williams
Boring of rudder horns is normally accomplished once a unit is erected, on scaffolding 40 feet above where other craftsmen are working on the hull of a ship. This team successfully performed the work while the ship unit was still inverted on the ground. This improved safety and reduced time to complete the work by 30 percent of the initial process.

LPD 25 Dry Docking Team
Doyle Adams, Leroy Cortez, Robert Hayes Sterling Landry III, C.P. O'Neal, Herman Watson and John Wilson
Prior to builder's sea trials, it was determined that the amphibious transport dock USS Somerset (LPD 25) required work in the dry dock. This type of repair could have easily taken several weeks if not for the drive, focus and dedication of this leadership team, who accomplished the repairs in two weeks.

CAR Reduction Initiative Team
Robert Bell, David Dixon, Brian Payton and Robert J. Shoemaker, Mike Strong and Stanley Walding
This team worked with the Supervisor of Shipbuilding, Gulf Coast to develop firm criteria for what should be grounds for receiving and resolving a corrective action report (CAR). The result has been a 40 percent reduction in the number of CARs issued from 2012 to 2013 and an 84 percent reduction of CARs that remained open within the year.

DDG 51 EPA Collection Team
Sheryl Ash, Robert E. Baker Jr., Caroline Brown and Sammy Roberts
Through extended negotiations, this team successfully negotiated the payment of the economic price adjustment provisions for 14 DDG contracts (prior and current), resulting in the receipt of $21.4 million earlier than expected.

Insurance Claim Team
David Criddle, Tom Hamrick, Chris Helton, Jay Jenkins, Sammy Roberts, Steve Sloan and Scott Weldon
This team was responsible for the development of the insurance claim after Hurricane Katrina and resolving the claim with insurers. After eight years of hard work, the company ultimately resolved the claim with insurers to everyone's satisfaction.

Huntington Ingalls Industries designs, builds and maintains nuclear and non-nuclear ships for the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard and provides after-market services for military ships around the globe. For more than a century, HII has built more ships in more ship classes than any other U.S. naval shipbuilder at its Newport News Shipbuilding and Ingalls Shipbuilding divisions. Employing more than 38,000 in Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana and California, HII also provides a wide variety of products and services to the commercial energy industry and other government customers, including the Department of Energy. For more information about HII, visit:

• HII on the web: www.huntingtoningalls.com
• HII on Facebook: www.facebook.com/HuntingtonIngallsIndustries
• HII on Twitter: twitter.com/hiindustries