Dallas-based international aviation advisory firm Mente Group (SD05, SD11) and Richard Roseman Airborne Design (RRAD) of Santa Fe, New Mexico, have formed a partnership, E-First/White Glove, a new completions management service, the companies announced this week at NBAA 2017. The offering aims to provide predictive de-risking and advanced program oversight for narrow and widebody aircraft projects for head-of-state and VIP customers.

Under the E-First (Engineering First) portion of the offering, design and engineering will be brought together from project inception. Mente and RRAD will conduct preliminary engineering reviews of the designer’s early concepts, addressing potentially challenging or “difficult to regulate” designs before the issues negatively impact the project’s schedule or budget.

“E-First represents a dramatic change in the industry in that if fully embraces not only engineering, but certification and budget very early in the design phase,” said Vince Restivo, Mente Group’s v-p of program management. “Our focus is on creating stability in what is often a destabilized setting.”

RRAD’s founder, Richard Roseman said the goal of the service “is to put an end to the out of control schedule and cost overruns that have sadly become all too common in today’s green completions environment. We are setting out to accomplish this by carefully stewarding our customer' resources and utilizing a combination of historically proven and revolutionary new processes.” Customers, he added, “have too often been short-changed in recent years, and we’re here to change that.”

The White Glove component of the service will provide what Restivo describes as a “redefinition of customer care” by combining Mente’s advanced technical offering with a customer interface and level of responsiveness “that truly matches the expectations of the customer.”