Amid all the fine financial news Boeing can tout - a record order backlog, robust profit margins, a higher profit outlook - one of the airplane maker’s dreariest performers continues to be its highest-tech, most fuel-efficient product: the 787 Dreamliner.

Project-based operations that improved on-time and on-budget performance by 10 percent or more were nine times as likely to also improve dramatically on key financial metrics such as net profit margin and cost of compliance. Nearly every project-based manufacturer feels it is important for their company to improve on end-to-end project management, but less than half of the companies in project manufacturing, aerospace and defense (A&D) and maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) sectors with project-based operations make wide use of any recognized category of commercial software system. This includes limited use of enterprise resources planning and quality management (QMS) systems.