Streamlining an engineering process for developing heat sinks illustrates process improvement and significant cost savings in engineering design and fabrication at APL. Reacting to a customer’s request that efforts be made to reduce program costs, a team representing design, fabrication, and quality assurance groups examined the process for developing heat sinks (metal plates attached to electronic circuit boards to dissipate heat). A diagram of the existing process is labeled “old process” in Fig. 9. A significant effort in design was involved in developing a fully dimensioned drawing of the heat sink so that these data could be entered by hand into a coordinate measuring machine used in inspection to measure the locations of the holes and slits in the metal plate and compare them to the dimensioned drawing. Real innovation occurred when this team challenged this method of inspection. Instead of using the machine for inspection, a full-sized Mylar drawing was created from the computer-aided design and used to overlay the heat sink. This innovative approach simplified the process to that labeled “new process” in Fig. 9.