Lee A. McIntire
President
Bechtel National, Inc.
ABSTRACT
Leveraging resources across DOE sites means sharing resources, avoiding duplication, and taking advantage of technology irrespective of where it was invented. Historically, DOE's numerous sites have been operated like independent silos; however, with the evolving mission of these sites and with more focus on cleanup rather than on production, opportunities for leveraging resources are right in front of us. Two factors that allow for resource leveraging are the DOE's Contract Reform initiatives and the entry of firms like ours into this growing market -- firms that have the experience to integrate activities at multiple sites, leveraging the resources of those sites to create more business opportunities for the customer at that site, for other customers in our business, and, most importantly, for our employees. We will meet the challenge of faster and more economical cleanups by taking advantage of the human potential at these sites, motivating people, and creating a vision for the future. Only through working together will we, the contractor community, labor, and DOE, achieve our goal of "doing more for less."
PAPER
Let me set the stage for a common understanding of what we mean when we talk about leveraging resources across DOE sites. For me, this is simply sharing resources, avoiding duplication, and taking advantage of technology irrespective of where it was invented.
This is easier said than done. DOE's numerous sites have historically and traditionally been operated under the old rules by various contractors like independent silos. The contracting rules of the past did not encourage the leveraging of resources or communications among contractors and competitors.
Well, things are changing. With the evolving mission of the DOE sites and with more focus on cleanup rather than on production, opportunities for leveraging resources are right in front of us. Two factors are allowing us to do this: the Contract Reform initiatives at DOE and the entry of firms like ours into this growing market. These are firms that have the experience to integrate activities at multiple sites and leverage the resources of those sites, creating more business opportunities for the customer at that site, for other customers in our business, and most importantly for our employees. This is also an essential element for coping with the downsizing taking place across the entire defense complex.
At Bechtel, and at other firms like ours, we take this as a challenge and an opportunity because this is what we do for a living. Let me start by bragging. Bechtel has had a 99-year history of successful accomplishments as a management and engineering-construction firm. We must be doing something right to sustain growth, innovation, and success. We have been managing our assets well. What assets? Our assets and resources are people: plain and simple.
Despite the vast distances that separate our people and projects around the globe (over 25,000 people and 1800 projects at last count), we continue to operate as a focused and fully integrated company, drawing on the needed resources wherever they may be. The continual challenge to me and our other managers is to energize our staff by establishing a common vision for the future, maintaining communications, and engendering a sense of family and of trust. In simple terms, we create the right environment and let our people do their jobs.
We at Bechtel have been working on government projects and at government sites for the past 25 years, and most recently our responsibilities at those sites have increased. In addition to being the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP) project manager, we are now at Savannah River, at Hanford, and at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) in significant capacities. We are also doing similar work on the same scale for non-DOE customers: for the Navy in San Diego and Jacksonville, and for the Air Force at various sites in the United States. We have had our share of success at these sites, and we feel that the time has come to expand the integration of our resources and to capitalize on the tremendous pool of talent at these sites.
Let me use our experience at Oak Ridge to illustrate how Bechtel has accomplished this. When we started in Oak Ridge in 1981, we had one contract and two employees. Our focus was the FUSRAP program. Over the years this office has grown to over 600 people and we have leveraged our resources from that office to do work all over the United States and overseas. We are now working in 31 states for the Navy, the Air Force, the Corps of Engineers, some state agencies, private customers, Taiwan's Power Company, and the Russian Federation, to name a few. We see that if we treat these sites and/or projects not as disjointed entities but as interrelated parts of a uniquely challenging megaproject - focusing not only on their differences but also on their common features - we can manage their collective resources to benefit the overall DOE cleanup mission as well as meet their individual site goals. When I talk about resources, I am talking about the professional staff at the DOE sites where Bechtel is working: 5,000 of the most qualified and technically skilled resources in this business. We can leverage this valuable resource by giving our staff the opportunities to move around and expand their professional and intellectual interests.
Our approach to life is simple. As professionals with a project management mentality, our prime objective is always to get the job done and to move on to the next one. This allows our people to channel their energies and creativity toward doing the job faster, cheaper, and better and allows us to grow our business.
Bechtel has brought this successful project management approach on commercial work to our DOE clients. Our approach has been the same: focus on each assignment as a "project," stress value added, and challenge staff to improve and accelerate the work. Motivating people and creating a vision for the future have contributed to impressive results. For example, at Hanford, by focusing on completion, we are spending almost 70 cents of every dollar on cleanup work, as compared to just 33% when we took over this work. We basically celebrate completion. We love to finish.
Applying our commercial approaches to our DOE work has proved extremely successful in other areas as well. Two notable examples are commercial practices and labor relations.
As a way of accelerating and institutionalizing the continued implementation of these strategies, we recently formed a Results Management Team to facilitate communication among personnel. Our ultimate goal is to share ideas, innovations, technologies, and resources. This team is chaired by a Bechtel senior vice president of operations and includes Bechtel managers of DOE sites and from selected non-DOE projects. The team reviews, approves, and drives implementation of initiatives to lower overheads and costs. Subject matter experts work on solutions and on sharing lessons learned across sites, as well as on improving the processes for increasing efficiencies and savings.
One of the first things our team attacked was the area of procurement. From our commercial experience, we know we can save our customers money by leveraging volume buying and by standardizing the procurement process. Our team believes that we can save 25% of our procurement dollars through the use of integrated purchasing methods and systems.
We also are looking into savings in areas of technology application. Our Technical Working Groups meet on a regular basis to ensure the cross fertilization of ideas, and sharing of lessons learned for solving our waste management problems. We are also establishing Centers of Technical Excellence to avoid duplication of resources at our sites. For example, our center of environmental excellence in Oak Ridge supports Bechtel's environmental work worldwide, and so does our decontamination and decommissioning (D&D) center of excellence at Hanford. We are aggressively working to develop cost models to encourage efficient utilization of technical resources across site boundaries and to enhance our networking technology to aid in the real time sharing of information and ideas.
People are not only our greatest asset but also the greatest immediate area for savings. We are implementing an integrated resource management concept to adopt such commercial practices as:
I want to go back to the people issue and ask you to share with me a vision of what is possible if we all collectively focus on the "people" component of our work. I have been encouraged by what we have been able to do:
But the human potential remains largely untapped at many of the DOE sites because of barriers like poor communications, hesitancy to challenge the technical assumptions made in earlier years, and a lack of connectivity among the technical players performing similar work across the sites. Let us also not forget that some employees still have the traditional mind set of longevity of the current job rather than enthusiasm for completion and change. My impression though, and this is based on my discussions with employees, is that most of our people want to know more about the opportunities and are eager to get on with the job.
We can, and must, unleash the potential of our people at DOE sites if we are to meet the challenges. We must expand our focus beyond the physical and contractual limits of each site, integrate the resources at these sites with the rest of Bechtel, and yes, with you out there who are our competitors. Given the tangible results we've achieved from a limited application of our integrated approach and applying commercial practices on several projects, we can only begin to imagine the possibilities.
We will meet the challenge of "doing more for less" only if we, the contractor community and DOE, work together. Bechtel intends to continue to strengthen our partnership with DOE to achieve these objectives. Most importantly, our partnership with our employees and with labor is what will carry the day.