When Deborah Hopkins walked into Boeing's overwhelmingly male-dominated factories and began talking to the engineers about their aircraft, she might have expected some resentment.
She experienced none. Instead, she has been inundated with requests for help. "You wouldn't believe the e-mails I get," says Ms Hopkins, who became Boeing's chief financial officer in January. "People want to understand the business."
Ms Hopkins (44), who came to Boeing from General Motors, has not been telling the engineers how to build aircraft. She has been talking to them about money: how much their aircraft make, what it costs to hold excess inventory and how much they are paying suppliers.
Most have not seen this information before. Ms Hopkins says that when Philip Condit, now Boeing's chairman, was in charge of the 777 aircraft programme, he never received any numbers.
But then no one on the Boeing shop floor thought numbers mattered much. All that counted was making and selling more aircraft than anyone else. There was the odd hint of trouble. In the mid1990s, Airbus Industrie, the European consortium, briefly sold more aircraft than Boeing, but the US manufacturer soon won back the leading slot.
Then, in 1997, Boeing's world came crashing down. Its factories seized up, unable to cope with a sudden increase in production. Assembly lines had to be suspended for a month. For the first time in 50 years, the group posted a net loss of £112 million sterling (€169 million). Boeing crawled back into profit last year with net earnings of $1.1billion (€980 million). But with revenues of $56.1 billion, its profitability was in the bottom quarter of S&P 500 companies.
Boeing was ready for change and Ms Hopkins' appointment was a vital part of it. "It's often that gut-wrenching experience that makes people understand we can't keep doing things the same way that we always have," she says.
Boeing's managers have had a "hell of a shock. When you have to stop a production line it's a rude awakening".
The US motor industry, where Ms Hopkins has spent much of her career, had already had that shock - courtesy of the Japanese. "That shock was pretty real. It really jarred the whole industry and made people focus on the need for lean manufacturing and being the lowest-cost producer."
But there are no Japanese manufacturers of civil aircraft to spur Boeing on. The only competition came from Airbus, and Boeing's managers persuaded themselves that the European manufacturer survived only because of government hand-outs.
Ms Hopkins does find the Airbus setup strange. Airbus is a confederation owned by four manufacturers - Aerospatiale Matra of France, DaimlerChrysler Aerospace of Germany, British Aerospace and Casa of Spain. It is not a limited company and publishes no accounts. Plans to turn Airbus into a limited company have been delayed by disagreements between its owners.
"It is truly unusual, although it's not unlike looking at Volkswagen as a competitor. It was very hard to get into how (Volkswagen) was doing, how they were investing so much. German accounting is very different. But (Airbus) is unlike anything I've ever dealt with. When you don't have any requirement to produce any numbers at any point in time, it's a heck of a lot easier to say whatever you want to say."
But, unlike some of her predecessors, Ms Hopkins sees little point in complaining about Airbus. "It is what it is." She also argues that Boeing needs to spend less time worrying about winning more orders than Airbus.
"Clearly, everyone wants to be the dominant player in an industry. It feels better. But I think there's a strong recognition that having that as your sole focus leads to bad decision-making. That's not what our shareholders are expecting us to do, that's not why they've entrusted their money to us - to get into some kind of macho battle. They want us to provide great returns."
Boeing cheered Wall Street last month by announcing higher than expected second-quarter profits of $701 million, up 172 per cent. But Ms Hopkins is not running "victory laps" yet.
Boeing needs to achieve double digit profit margins on a consistent basis. Its aircraft "are some of the most incredible, complex products in the world". They should be producing decent profits, "not what I sometimes call grocery store margins", she says.
Parts of Boeing, such as its defence and space divisions, were already aware of their financial position because their biggest customer, the US government, insisted on strict accounting.
But the first thing Ms Hopkins had to do was to teach the commercial aircraft division about money. Boeing last month unveiled a "value scorecard", outlining four goals to be achieved in three to five years. The first is to increase the inventory turnover from today's level of 2.9 times a year to four times a year. The other goals are reductions in factory floor space, in overhead costs and in the number of suppliers, which is expected to fall from 31,000 to 18,000.
Achieving those goals will produce "multi-billion dollars" of incremental cash flow, Ms Hopkins says. When the goals have been achieved, Ms Hopkins says Boeing will set even tougher ones. The scorecard will be published quarterly, not just to educate staff but to show investors and analysts how well the company is doing.
She is keen to see Boeing move into new businesses, particularly in servicing and maintaining aircraft, where profit margins are higher than in manufacturing. It is a crowded area. "Everyone and their brother wants to get into the service business," she concedes.
Some airlines, such as Lufthansa of Germany, have large aircraft servicing businesses too. Ms Hopkins does not exclude the idea of forming an alliance with airlines to service aircraft.
Boeing is also thinking about expanding the role of its corporate credit division, which provides finance for the purchase and leasing of property and machine tools, as well as aircraft. Ms Hopkins will present proposals on the division's future to the Boeing board later this year.
The improvement she wants to see in Boeing's profit margins is going to be hard to achieve over the next few years. Boeing will be selling many recently designed aircraft - such as the twin-engined 777 and new versions of the single aisle 737 - and profit margins are lower on new models. The airline industry is also expected to enter a downturn over the next few years.
"Because of where we are in the cycle, we lose about $10 billion in revenue next year. The goal we've put in place for the organisation is that we're going to grow earnings per share and increase earnings next year despite losing that revenue. That means we have to do even more.
"But it's do-able. That's what we're driving for - to have all of our investors say, `hey, just because we're reaching the bottom of the cycle doesn't mean it isn't a good place to be investing', because we're going to grow our way through it."
She has not come across anyone at Boeing who disagrees with this strategy or who wants to go back to the old ways. "This is a team that's been top of the heap for years and they want to be back there again," she says.
