The founder, president and Principal Consultant of Appletree Consulting, Inc. (ACI) is Bernard Evans. Bernard has a master's degree (MSc) in Electronics and experience spanning most engineering-related aspects of the aerospace industry dating back to 1989.

Bernard incorporated ACI in September 1999 to address the business need he perceived while representing a UK aerospace company at customers, suppliers, subcontractors and partners in Europe, America and Canada. ACI has since undertaken roles and responsibilities described below:

• Monitoring and expediting of issues on existing schedules so as to meet key customer and supplier milestones, taking action where necessary to bring delinquent issues to light and developing a plan of action to address them.

• Compiling information from customer and partner sites to facilitate production planning, address shortfalls, to monitor progress and to close out long running issues involving order amendments and repair turn around time.

• Providing tailored feedback, obtaining information and improving information exchange so as to overcome difficulties inherent with businesses separated by significant time zone differences, thus achieving results faster than had been previously possible.

• Representing clients at meetings, telecons and briefings and providing daily status reports to the clients' management team, tracking progress against schedule, key issues and deliverables, and reporting problems, delays and upcoming issues.

Prior to incorporating ACI, Bernard held positions in engineering relating to design, development, production and testing. This was followed by several years as an overseas on-site in project management representative of a large UK aerospace company working in representation, co-ordination, liaison and management roles. Over these years, Bernard's experience included:

• Uncovering and highlighting problems, latent issues and delays and working with the associated people to resolve the issues and conflicts as necessary.

• Ensuring engineering, production, test, quality and program management departments have, and are using, appropriate, up-to-date information, hardware and specifications.

• Prioritizing, planning and sequencing test activities based on factors such as availability of hardware, software, personnel and equipment.

• Representing engineering on a multi-site, multi-discipline task force, which ultimately reduced production test rejects by over 28% on a major production program.