And this is not just BS. No way, it’s not true. I’ve been doing this job for a long time. And I’ve got with lots of customers over the years, some really good, some were not so good. But this customer’s special, I would say, quite special, and the relationship with them is quite special to really a true partnership. If you run a while, you get nervous when a customer talks about being partners because that means when they want something, you’re partners, when you want something, you’re not a partner anymore. But with MRS, I gave you a dozen examples without even thinking about it. It’s been a true partnership, win-win, true. Their sourcing people are very enlightened, I would say, very enlightened people. But to put it kindly, maybe inventory management, if not the aerospace industry’s strongest suit.
What’s going on here? I’ll give you my opinion. I’m not extra in the aerospace industry. It’s a strange industry, no doubt. It’s very risk adverse and adverse is to change, but that’s for obvious reasons because of safety. The FDA doesn’t want some OEM or a contractor to make and change – to willy-nilly to airplanes or structures and systems, that would be like a danger, chaos, would be dangerous. But there are some collateral effects in my opinion, again, related to this being risk averse and resistant to change. So what happens in the aerospace industry, in my opinion, again, is the players tend to go on autopilot too long, they tend to overshoot. They just kind of get something locked in, and they’re not paying attention to the signals that much.
There are not that much agility, let’s say. So it may be a little bit of a byproduct of being risk averse and resistant to change, which is good – to be that for safety. So what happens is, that could lead to increasing oscillations with these overshoots. You wait too long, you wait too long, you’re not reacting. And then by the time you realize, you’re six months late and react and then you have to – the correction is – could be pretty extreme. So for Park, I mean, we’re not going to change the aerospace industry. We chose to be in the aerospace industry. What does it mean for us? We need to be really agile, flexible, have a lot of urgency and how we manage our business. We’re certainly not singling out MRAS, they’re probably better than a lot of other companies in the aerospace industry.
But this is, I guess, try to be kind of delicate about – this is what’s going on here and why we have this surprise and this inventory burn down. Will this kind of inventory surprise happen again? Likely it will happen to [indiscernible], how close do we work with MRAS? We work with them really closely. There’s nothing hidden or anything like that. It’s very transparent. It’s happened before, likely it will happen again at some point in the future. So there maybe, like, it will be some degree of quarter-to-quarter volatility in our GE Program sales because of inventory management challenges, maybe some of the rollercoaster from time to time. That’s just what it is, in my opinion. Slide 29. But by considering all the wonderful things which have resulted from the relationship with MRAS and the many wonderful things still expected to come from the relationship on balance, there’s no question whatsoever in our minds that we are extremely fortunate MRAS as a customer on balance, not even close when you consider the plus and minuses.
Not even close. No. Nothing to talk about, not even close. Now there may be quarter-to-quarter GE Program sales volatility in the future, we’re happy to work through and deal with the volatility and challenges presented by it, because to us, overridingly important consideration in long term, is a long-term outlook for GE program sales, which we explained on Slide 34. Yes, it causes – we have to – of course, it’s a challenge towards our production management, with supply chain management and with our staffing management. We’re happy to deal with it. We’re happy to deal with it, on balance, not even close. So where are we going with the burn down? Based on the information we have, we have a lot. We believe the burn-down will likely be completed in our Q3 and our Park inventory carried by MRAS will be “normalized”, by the end of Q3, we put normalized in quote for a reason, because that’s kind of a complicated term.
