Under our Pivot to Growth Strategy, we have continued to build upon our strong track record of operational and financial excellence, and have refocused our efforts to realize efficiencies necessary to deliver profitable growth. Our recent results for 2022 reflect this continued strong execution as well as the benefits of our ongoing company-wide operational excellence and newly deployed commercial excellence initiatives.
Leveraging the Operational Growth Platform
Since its rollout, our Operational Growth Platform, or OGP, as shown below, has provided greater management focus, attention, and energy to enhance growth across the portfolio, from reinvigorating innovation and opportunities for investment to providing new opportunities in commercial excellence. It has also provided opportunities to improve business development, sales and engineering collaboration to capture new growth vectors where a solution may not currently exist.
As a result, our efforts in these areas provide us continued opportunities for long-term growth and increased efficiency, which could free up money to cover acquisition integration costs, be further distributed to research and development investments, or result in margin expansion, but these will be focused and purposeful investment decisions.
We continue to drive our efficient processes and dedication to operational excellence with the same level of commitment and vigor that this team has demonstrated historically where, for example, we generated strong margin expansion of more than 800 basis points in the past nine years and achieved a 17.3% adjusted operating margin in 2022. In addition, we developed a new continuous assessment process to measure our performance in each element of the OGP to help us drive operational excellence and growth.
We generated strong margin expansion of more than 800 basis points in the past nine years and achieved a 17.3% adjusted operating margin in 2022.
We provide technology that requires the highest levels of quality and precision in the manufacturing process, such as our generator and pump rotor shafts used in machinery supplied to the naval defense and commercial nuclear markets.
This past year, nearly all Curtiss-Wright business units completed their self-assessments and were measured on various Key Performance Indicators or KPIs used to ensure performance to the highest standards of operational excellence. A multi-functional team audited the highest-scoring business units to identify best practices, validate the assessment tool and ensure compliance which, in turn, will lead to the development of action plans and training programs to encourage knowledge transfer to build upon best practices, and improve KPI’s across the organization.
We developed a new continuous assessment process to measure our performance in each element of the OGP to help us drive operational excellence and growth.
Driving Commercial Excellence
We are also raising the bar in operational improvements. The team is dedicated to driving Commercial Excellence initiatives which have been instituted across all of our businesses to help identify and implement opportunities in pricing to combat the cost impact of inflation, rising interest rates, supply chain disruption and other macro pressures, while also providing opportunities to improve our working capital, and ultimately, our free cash flow generation.
Curtiss-Wright employees discuss the performance of the hydraulic controls for a Horizontal Boring Machine used to manufacture our critical pump technology.
In early 2021, we conducted vast training across our financial leadership on contract management, well in advance of the current macro pressures impacting our operations. This program helped to educate our leaders on strengthening contract terms and negotiations with our customers. During 2022, we continued to raise prices for our products and services, properlyrecognizing the customer value proposition in our offering, while conducting high-level, open and transparent discussions with our suppliers, to ensure a stable and accurate foundation. We also utilized measurement tools and real-time analysis of our operations to help improve our results. Meanwhile, our efforts in contract excellence have already begun to drive further improvements in working capital and efficiency in financing.
Looking ahead, we remain confident that our company-wide operational and commercial excellence initiatives will continue to drive efficiency and operating margin expansion for Curtiss-Wright as we execute on our Pivot to Growth strategy.