More Rapid Response
MORE RAPID RESPONSE
The Army’s popular Rapid Response acquisition program is currently in the
process of yet another recompete, this time for as many as 10 prime contractors.
By Peter A. Buxbaum
In 1998, Tinker Air Force Base, Okla., was tasked with upgrading some of the Air Force’s aging platforms. In talking to the acquisitions center at Tinker, the program managers learned it would take two years to get a contract for technology insertion in place.
The Tinker folks happened to be consulting on the project with the Army’s Research, Development and Engineering Center (RDEC) at Fort Monmouth, N.J. Through RDEC, the Tinker people were introduced to some change-minded acquisition specialists who were working on developing quick-response acquisition strategies and methodologies.
The result was the first task orders issued through a new rapid response contract awarded through the Army’s Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM). Bidders had only five days to hand in their proposals; a contact award was put in place in a lightening-fast 19 days.
That was 10 years ago. In 1998, Rapid Response (R2) was awarded to three prime contractors. The program was recompeted in 2003 and awarded to eight primes. The next phase, Rapid Response Third Generation (R23G), is currently in the process of yet another recompete, this time for as many as 10 prime contractors. The full and open competition reserves four slots for small businesses and one for a service-disabled veteran-owned small business.
The need for, and value of, rapid response involves the convergence of several elements. The military has for the last few years emphasized the acquisition and adaptation of COTS technologies, primarily to reduce acquisitions costs in the face of tighter budgets. Acquiring COTS products has the added advantage of reducing lead times: contractors offer or adapt their existing products instead of having to develop new competencies.
The need to acquire and quickly field new capabilities has grown since 2003, analysts say, as U.S. forces have sought to overcome difficult challenges in the Iraq war.
Another factor that has sped up award and delivery times is the nature of the contracts themselves. Prime contractors are awarded indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts on the basis of their proven ability to deliver a range of capabilities. Individual deliverables are awarded separately as task orders after competition among the primes. This contracting method has necessitated changes in government contracting organizations as well as among the contractors bidding for the work.
Engineering Services
R23G is essentially a continuation of its earlier iterations and will refresh the program’s funding level, which has been exhausted. The current rapid response contract has a ceiling of $23.2 billion, and R23G is expected to be funded at the $41 billion level.
The contract is designed to provide a range of engineering services to military services and agencies, as well other federal government entities. NASA has been among the non-DoD customers to use the vehicle in the past.
Services covered under the contract include research and development, technology insertion, system integration and installation, testing and certification, logistics support services and training services. Contractors are instructed to use commercial products, processes and practices to reduce development, production and operational support costs.
“Our involvement with Rapid Response stems back to 1998, when the first contact was awarded,” said Judith Burke, vice president for IDIQ solutions at Lockheed Martin. “We were fortunate to have been chosen at that time as one of three prime contractors. In 2003, when the contract was recompeted, we were successful again as one of eight prime contractors.”
Lockheed Martin has participated in a variety of tasks awarded under the rapid response contracts. “We’ve done C4ISR, tactical and strategic surveillance, aviation support, system integration and engineering, training, and logistics support,” said Burke. “Some of these have been for customers involved in counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism activities.”
Raytheon, which has been involved in rapid response as a subcontractor, participated in developing a command center for U.S. diplomats in Iraq, related Tom Stazler, the company’s business development director for command and control systems. Raytheon has also been involved in deploying persistent surveillance systems to support U.S. warfighters in forward positions in Iraq.
“The government put us under contract in a matter of days, and we were able to design, build and test the command center within 21 days,” Stazler said of the command center. The project included installing secure satellite and telephone communications as well as local- and wide-area data networks.
“We could not have accomplished this without being in a forward leaning position to act quickly to support the customer,” he said.
The credit for the delivery of rapid capabilities belongs not only to the contractors, but also to the contracting office, CECOM’s R2 program office, according to Burke. “They have an exemplary governance model,” she said. “They have a dedicated management team and a solid model of how to manage this multi-billion dollar program.”
Acquisitions Experience
One thing that distinguishes Rapid Response from other governmentwide IDIQ acquisition contracts is that the program office manages the contract as a whole, and not by individual task order, according to Burke. “The program officers are out there advocating the use of this vehicle,” she said. “They are talking to government constituents and explaining how they can add speed to their acquisitions with the technical and contracting assistance that the program office affords.”
“A successful acquisition starts with the requirements documents,” said Sandy Rogan, the R2 project officer.
R2 customers, the acquiring agencies, are considered to be the experts on their requirements, but not on the acquisitions process. A key deficit among many military engineers is that they lack experience in acquisitions processes and in how to develop the necessary documents, participants suggest.
“What sets R2 aside from other IDIQ contracts and makes it advantageous to come to our program are the subject matter experts in budgeting and engineering that we have on staff to help write up requirements,” Rogan explained. “Our acquisitions specialists help our customers create the best requirements package. When we award a task order, our customer becomes the task leader but the program office manages the task order from competition to close out.”
Before, engineers would have to write up their own requirements, including cost estimates and security requirements, Rogan noted. In the past, some acquisitions organizations had larger staffs that could help with those tasks. But many organizations have been slimmed down, making it impossible for them to put together a complete acquisitions package themselves.
“It is difficult to translate performance-based requirement for bidding purposes,” said Rogan. “That is one of the main reasons customers come to our organization. We have subject matter expertise to rely on.”
The R2 program office emphasizes speed of delivery, currently averaging 35 days to finalize a contract. That raises the obvious question of how a single program office can reduce typical acquisition cycles from years to days.
“We are advocates of Lean Six Sigma,” said Rogan, referring to methodologies used to improve business process. “We are constantly reviewing processes and have developed process templates that help customers move information along. We use our IT infrastructure as a force multiplier to do more with less people.”
At the same time, Rogan added, “Quality does not suffer because we have institutionalized these processes over 10 years.”
The R2 program office is also aided by an agreement with the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) to streamline its review of contracts. “The management of the contract, once awarded, is just as critical as getting the contract awarded,” said Rogan. “Our agreement with DCMA ensures that we have a quick response on contract administration issues.”
The program office also endeavors to absorb changes in acquisition processes and regulations as quickly as possible. “The acquisition process is always changing,” said Rogan. “There are always new requirements and new regulations. We embrace these changes quickly and absorb them into our processes as soon as we can.”
Contractors also have adapted their processes and structures to the changes brought by rapid response. “We developed an IDIQ organization in order to define best practices in the company and to effectively manage IDIQ task orders,” said Burke.
Burke’s organization has responsibility for R2 within Lockheed Martin, as well as many other, but not all, IDIQ contracts in which the company participates.
“We endeavor to proactively define the best market solutions for customers quickly, to manage the task order proposal and pricing processes quickly, and to get people on staff quickly,” said Burke. “Our organization is essentially a center of excellence within our part of Lockheed Martin.”
Automation is one of the keys to the speed Burke’s organization brings to the rapid response process. “We use automation whenever possible in order to meet timelines,” she said. “We have added a lot of automation to our library of capabilities, to proposal development, and to pricing.”
Lockheed Martin has been able to increase IDIQ business by marketing its rapid response capabilities to existing and prospective customers. “When we market to customers, we direct them to this vehicle,” said Burke. “As they develop new needs, we are able to demonstrate how they can acquire new solutions in as little as 30 days. The speed and agility that we have developed is a capability that we are able to deliver to customers.”
Spreading IDIQ
Raytheon also set up an IDIQ service center three years ago after realizing that IDIQ contracts would be a major aspect of its business in the future. As a result, the company has increased its IDIQ business by 380 percent during that period.
“DoD used IDIQ 30 percent of the time three years ago,” said Susan Haeseler, the center’s director. “Now it is up to 42 percent. We came to understand that our customers need to acquire solutions that move as fast as technology.”
Haeseler’s job has been to spread the understanding of IDIQ across the company and to set up a proposal factory to develop quick responses to its customers. She organizes dozens of training sessions on IDIQ throughout the company annually.
Raytheon also changed its internal policy so that any unit can use any IDIQ vehicle within the company without being charged for that privilege. In the past, an outside unit was treated, in effect, as a subcontractor of the unit managing the IDIQ vehicle.
Raytheon’s IDIQ organization also enables the company to view task orders at an enterprise level in order to marshal its resources for a proper response. Before, task orders were typically examined in isolation by product-line units.
“As task orders come in, we shoot them out by way of our formalized network,” said Haeseler. “Within a couple of hours we have that information out to 73,000 businesses.”
For all of Raytheon’s success in IDIQ, the company has been frustrated that its role to date in the rapid response contract has been that of a subcontractor. “Our current position is not as good for us or for the government to take advantage of our capabilities,” said Stazler, adding that the company is hoping for a prime slot on the next go-round.
Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are only two of the hundreds of companies that have participated in rapid response. “We had eight primes last time, and each had an average of 50 subs,” said Rogan. “We had a total of some 400 companies, large and small, that embraced rapid response.
“It has been a win-win for both industry and government,” she added. “The contractors have been able to get their technical abilities out to warfighters very quickly and to help the government customers meet their mission requirements. The defense industrial base has performed very successfully in this program.”
As a result, other programs in DoD have begun to copy the R2 methodology, according to Rogan.
If there has been a disadvantage to rapid response, it is that “it takes a while to get used to if you’re coming from the old school,” said Haeseler. “It takes an education process, and that is what we have done. We’ve formalized education for everyone from business development to contracting to finance and supply chain management on how to respond more quickly.”
Burke voiced another challenging aspect of the program: “With the rapid pace involved, this is not for the faint of heart.” ♦
