The Contracting Education Academy

Contracting Academy Logo
  • Home
  • Training & Education
  • Services
  • Contact Us
You are here: Home / Archives for manufacturing

February 12, 2014 By AMK

Defense Department not comfortable if major contractors look to merge

The Defense Department remains skeptical of mergers involving its major contractors, a Pentagon official said on Wednesday, amid industry expectations that defense deal-making could revive this year.

Elana Broitman, whose office at the Defense Department reviews deals that involve national security issues, told an investor conference that “there are far fewer of the large firms, so we’re in a more constrained environment.

“Even though we’re seeing a budget downturn which has corresponded to consolidation in the past, we’d be less comfortable now because of that smaller number,” said Broitman, the acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for manufacturing and industrial base policy.

Defense M&A activity ground to a near halt in recent years amid uncertainty about future U.S. military spending that has kept sellers on edge and buyers more apt to invest in share buybacks and dividend payouts than acquisitions.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/05/us-usa-defense-mergers-idUSBREA1428K20140205

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: competition, DoD, industrial base, M&A, manufacturing, mergers

February 28, 2013 By AMK

General: ‘Lots of money’ left after sequester

The former head of Army logistics tried to assure a nervous audience of defense industry executives last Thursday (2/21/2013) that “it’s not all doom and gloom” for their bottom lines despite the massive budget cuts underway as the nation’s military rebalances after nearly 12 years of war.

“Our budget still has almost $500 billion” at the baseline even when the impact of major automatic defense spending cuts under the “sequestration” process on March 1 is taken into account, said Army Maj. Gen. Lynn A. Collyar, former director of Defense Logistics Agency’s logistics operations.

“That’s a lot of money,” Collyar said of the $500 billion.  “We can’t afford to just throw money around,” he said, but “there is still a lot of money out there” for companies that can adapt to the new era of declining defense budgets.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2013/02/21/lot-of-money-left-after-sequester/

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: Budget Control Act, budget cuts, DoD, industrial base, manufacturing, sequestration, spending

October 10, 2012 By AMK

DoD carries weight of governmentwide small business goal

For the federal government to finally hit its 23 percent small business goal, the Defense Department will have to step up its efforts to contract with small firms. But the nature of DoD’s large contracts often leave out small companies.

In four of the last five years, if DoD had made its small business contracting goal, the federal government would have hit its overall goal. In fiscal 2011, the government fell $5.4 billion short. The Defense Department, with a goal of 22.28 percent for small business contracting that year, missed its mark by $7.2 billion. Each agency negotiates with the Small Business Administration its own small business prime-contracting goal.

Defense contracts make up two-thirds of the entire government’s contracting expenditures. DoD is best known for buying planes, tanks and ships — often products and services out of the scope of small companies. Last year, for example, DoD spent tens of billions of dollars across 11 product codes that included everything from guided space missiles to space vehicles. Of that, less than 1 percent went to small businesses.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.federalnewsradio.com/522/3058191/DoD-carries-weight-of-governmentwide-small-business-goal.

(This story is part one of Federal News Radio’s special report, The Small Business Dilemma.)

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: acquisition strategy, acquisition training, acquisition workforce, ARRA, CAM, continuing resolution, DoD, GAO, industrial base, manufacturing, Navy, OMB, SAT, SBA, SDVOSB, set-aside, small business goals, subcontracting goals

June 29, 2011 By AMK

Small business grows green manufacturing jobs

All across America, GSA is seeing great examples of entrepreneurship and innovation, even though we’re facing some of the toughest economic times we’ve experienced since the Great Depression. Seeing this occur in the manufacturing sector is especially exciting because maintaining our competitiveness in this area will help move our economy forward!

Yesterday, I had the privilege of seeing this first-hand at a company called Okabashi, a flip-flop manufacturer in Buford, Georgia that utilizes a manufacturing process that is virtually 100 percent waste-free – closed loop recycling. In addition to diverting thousands of flip-flops from landfills and shorelines, the company produces sustainable flip-flops that are 100 percent recyclable and made of at least 25 percent recycled materials. Okabashi is also committed to reusing or recycling 100 percent of its manufacturing waste, and 100,000 shoes are reground each year. Additionally, the 2 percent of Okabashi materials that cannot be reused for shoes is diverted to other companies to make industrial mats and roofing materials.

On top of its leadership in sustainability, Okabashi is committed to keeping its manufacturing and distribution functions right here in the United States. As President Obama said in his remarks at Alcoa’s aerospace plant recently, “we have to make things right here in America.” And Okabashi is doing just that. In fact, Okabashi, a small business on Main Street, employs approximately 60 people and, depending on the season, their workforce can grow to more than 200 people. Not only are these jobs good middle class jobs, they’re also green jobs. On top of that, Okabashi is exporting its shoes to 16 different countries, which, as the President has said time and time again, is critical to America achieving sustainable economic growth.

They’ve also undertaken efforts to leverage their supply chain to minimize the company’s impact on the environment, a goal that is close to our hearts at GSA, an agency that is committed to achieving a zero environmental footprint. GSA is leveraging its buying power to do the same thing, especially with respect to meeting its obligations under the Sustainability Executive Order.

During my visit, my team and I toured the manufacturing operations and met with management and other employees. We engaged in a productive conversation about how we can help small businesses create good middle class and green manufacturing jobs. Personally, this experience hit close to home, because the founder fled Iran during the Revolution. Even though he and his family lost everything, he tapped into that entrepreneurial spirit that made him successful before to start a small business in Georgia. With hard work, he created a successful and innovative manufacturing company that has created many jobs in Georgia. I happen to be the son of an Indian immigrant small business owner, so I fully appreciate the sacrifices that Okabashi’s founder made to realize the American Dream and contribute to the economic and social fabrics of America.

At GSA we are committed to assisting our customers with their real estate, procurement, fleet and other needs so they can focus on their core mission. In order for us to do that, we need more green companies like Okabashi providing goods and services to our federal customers. Not only will this ensure that we can help our customers meet their sustainability goals, it will also enable us to accomplish our mission to make government work better for the American people through our commitment to sustainability.

So to all the other small businesses out there, we will continue to have conversations with you about what we can do to harness your energy, talent and ideas – so that we can win the future by out-educating, out-innovating, and out-building our competitors. It’s important to GSA because, as the business, real estate and fleet arms of the federal government, we need your business so that our customers will have the goods and services they need to keep our country safe, dispense justice, inspect mines, keep our environment clean, administer social security benefits, adjudicate claims, address poverty and perform other important duties that are appreciated by the American people.

— Posted by Shyam Reddy, Regional Administrator, GSA Southeast Sunbelt Region on June 29th, 2011 at http://gsablogs.gsa.gov/gsablog/category/small-business/ 

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: green products, innovation, manufacturing, small business, sustainability

June 2, 2011 By AMK

Obama’s regulatory chief announces reforms at 30 agencies

Fleshing out agency responses to President Obama’s push to rethink regulations, Office of Information and Regulatory Administrator Cass Sunstein on Thursday announced alterations to long-standing rules under way at 30 federal agencies that together, he said, could save billions in dollars and millions of staff hours.

In his summary of agency progress 120 days after Obama’s Jan. 18 executive order, Sunstein said current paperwork reduction efforts at the Transportation and Labor departments and the Environmental Protection Agency alone could save $1 billion and tens of millions of work hours for state and local governments. He spoke at a talk titled “A Regulatory Look-Back: A First Look” at the American Enterprise Institute, his former employer, and he published a related op-ed on “21st-Century Regulation” in the May 26 Wall Street Journal.

The Obama initiative, Sunstein said, is “a corrective to national debate on regulation that has become polarized and stylized in a way not helpful. One side,” he said, “defends reductions in deaths on the highway, fighting fraud and abuse, keeping air and water clean and our food safe. But more recently, the other side says such regulations impair competitiveness, undermine innovation and ultimately cost jobs.

“They are legitimate arguments, but we can’t be solving serious problems in the abstract. The polarized debate is stuck in the past.”

A modern regulatory approach, he said, cannot rely on “anecdotes or intuition,” but instead must move toward “real-world random testing” of the benefits and harms of regulations. This requires “a change in culture in Washington to focus constantly on what is and what is not working,” he said. In the future, “agencies must hard-wire such scrutiny into agency processes.”

Today’s professional regulators “know much more than they knew during the New Deal and the Great Society,” or even during the 1980s and 1990s, he added. “Now we have state-of-the-art technology for cataloging the impact, risks and costs of regulations. Sometimes in reducing one risk, you increase another and there are ancillary harms,” he said. “But there are also ancillary benefits, and lives are saved.” What is desirable, he said, is “free choice, which both provides liberty and costs less.” Simpler regulations and public disclosure “help produce informed choices and creative approaches,” Sunstein said.

Sunstein made a bid to bridge the partisan divide. “It’s true that people’s values differ, but when the evidence is clear, it will lead in a direction even if there is an intensive difference in values. If a regulation brings big costs and little benefit, then citizens are unlikely to like it regardless of whether they are elephants or donkeys,” he said.

Examples of agencies’ current work include 70 initiatives at Transportation, 50 reforms at the Health and Human Resources Department, and 12 short-term high-priority projects at EPA. The Treasury Department has a five-year paperless initiative that will save 12 million pounds of paper and $400 million, Sunstein said.

EPA recently decided that that classifying milk as an oil — and thus requiring precautions to prevent oil spills — was an unjustifiable burden on dairy farmers, and so the resulting easing of rules will save industry $1 billion in the next decade. Similarly, EPA determined that gas stations no longer need air pollution recovery systems because modern vehicles do the job, saving upwards of $60 million annually, he said. And the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, he said, will save millions of dollars by eliminating 1.9 million annual hours of redundant employer reporting.

“Many of the [reforms] focus on the small businesses that create jobs,” Sunstein said. “And some are a fundamental rethinking of how things have been done.”

He is also determined to rid the Code of Federal Regulations of references to countries that “no longer exist.”

Laying out four principles, Sunstein said modern regulations should encourage public participation through ready access to scientific and technical information; should be harmonized and simplified to boost innovation; should use quantification to catalog costs and benefits; and emphasize freedom of choice, which “promotes compliance.”

In response to a questioner, Sunstein acknowledged that some of the recent changes were expansions of regulations rather than eliminations.

The National Association of Manufacturers, which has long been critical of Obama’s approach to regulation, reacted to Sunstein’s announcement with a statement: “Manufacturers are encouraged by the Obama administration’s efforts to streamline or remove several outdated and unnecessary regulations to allow manufacturers to focus on what matters most — creating jobs and economic growth. However, manufacturing workers will not fully benefit until the crushing burden of proposed new regulations is brought under control.

“The administration has taken several positive steps recently,” the group said. mentioning EPA’s effort on industrial boilers and OSHA’s work on noise standards as indicators that the administration has heard the concerns of manufacturers. “But new burdensome regulations such as those proposed by EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and change ozone standards are a real threat to job creators and the economy. While today’s announcement is a great step, more must be done to limit the cumulative burden of regulations on businesses.”

Matt Madia, regulatory policy analyst for OMB Watch, a monitoring nonprofit, had a wait-and-see response. “There’s nothing wrong with doing a review,” he said, “but we should not lose sight of the fact that these regulations were written for a reason — to protect the environment, human health and the economy.”

Sunstein said there currently are 120 rules under review at the Office of Management and Budget and that the look back has not caused any noticeable slowdown.

The agency actions released today are for public comment, and should be finalized in “roughly 80 days,” he said.

Sunstein called his initiative “a defining moment” that will have impact decades in the future. He quoted Alexander Hamilton’s first Federalist paper, in which the Founding Father asked whether the country would be guided by “reflection and choice or be forever destined to depend on accident and force.”

– by Charles S. Clark – Government Executive – May 26, 2011 at http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=47880&dcn=e_gvet

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: DOT, economic recovery, EPA, federal regulations, HHS, manufacturing, OMB, OSHA, regulatory reform, small business, Treasury Dept.

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • Next Page »

Popular Topics

abuse acquisition reform acquisition strategy acquisition training acquisition workforce Air Force Army AT&L bid protest budget budget cuts competition cybersecurity DAU DFARS DHS DoD DOJ FAR fraud GAO Georgia Tech GSA GSA Schedule GSA Schedules IG industrial base information technology innovation IT Justice Dept. Navy NDAA OFPP OMB OTA Pentagon procurement reform protest SBA sequestration small business spending technology VA
Contracting Academy Logo
75 Fifth Street, NW, Suite 300
Atlanta, GA 30308
info@ContractingAcademy.gatech.edu
Phone: 404-894-6109
Fax: 404-410-6885

RSS Twitter

Search this Website

Copyright © 2023 · Georgia Tech - Enterprise Innovation Institute