Letter to the Editor

Your June 28th article "DoD: Still Stuck in Procurement Hell" resonates in a significant way with my company. We were notified by a large defense prime contractor in April that our company was selected to be a subsystem supplier on a major military program. Without going into exhaustive detail, we were asked by the Prime to bid at the subsystem level (attractive to us), which we competitively won versus a number of very large defense contractors by offering an approximate two-fold increase in the overall performance capability of the system but were
told that our scope of work on the program had to be significantly reduced due to the fact that our small, commercially-oriented business didn't yet have the necessary documentation in place to meet the contract requirements prescribed by the DoD. Examples of this documentation included an audited Earned Value System, a DCAA audited accounting system, and certified quality management, program management, and configuration management plans, to name a few. We were (and still are) excited by the potential to play such a strategic role in such an important program to the DoD, but the business opportunity has become somewhat less attractive to us at the reduced scope. It will be interesting to see 2 years from now (when development is complete) whether it was worth the trouble...Thanks for the valuable and
provocative articles."

Stuart P. Coppedge, Vice President, Engineering of ThinKom Solutions, Inc.

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