Loachman said:
MCG said:
Generally, lowest cost compliant has been a discouraged selection criteria for major projects as it is not seen to get good value.
Good. Has this helped?
Good question. I don't know, but you will have seen its outputs. It has been over a decade now that the philosophy in ADM(Mat) has been that lowest cost compliant is the wrong procurement method for new capabilities or major equipment. Instead, they talk about "best value for money" which really boils down to recognizing that spending more to get something better often pays off in lower lifecycle costs, longer equipment relevance (ie. does not need to be replaced as soon), and/or greater operational capability. So, we define the minimum compliance standard and then some calculus to compare cost and performance above minimum compliance across all proposals. This will have made a difference both in the proposals that industry has packaged together in response to RFPs (they know they can get more money by offering something that exceeds the minimum requirements) and in the proposals that are eventually selected by the project team.
However, I worry that we lack the professional competencies to always craft beneficial statements of requirement or cost-per-point selection criteria. On the Army side, we send people to our requirements staff without having put them through technical staff training, and we have people with technical staff training who spend little to no time in requirements staff. The RCEME capbage is seemingly believed to imbue the wearer great abilities in the field of capitol equipment procurement projects, when what we really need is expert civilian procurement project managers who take the outputs of the requirement staffs and then buy the things we need; the RCEME capbadges should focus on maintenance management (which could include in-service equipment management, and it should include inputs to requirement writing) and leave strategic purchasing to professionals in that field.
George Wallace said:
If you really want to nit pick...
No. It is not nit picking to want to differentiate between some guy's assumptions and known facts when having an informed discussion. This goes directly to the credibility, value and weight to be given to statements being made. So, you made a blanket statement based on assumption but presented as though it were truth in order to segue into a broad-brush slagging of people that you don't even know. When a little light was shone onto the assumption, you doubled down with decades old examples (at least one going back to 4 CMBG and potentially both being linked to your lowest-cost conclusion by, again, an assumption) and threw-out "nit pick" to trivialize the distinction between facts vs "invented facts". I too have had "conversations with some people a little closer to the inner workings of those decision makers" (in fact, for a brief period I was one of those people), and I have followed a few SITREPS through this site that indicated there were trials involved in the selection process that you have written off as just being handed to the lowest bidder. Maybe one does not agree with the conclusion of those trials, but that is a different story. Based on my observations it appears to me that the foundational premise, in your argument accusing "penny pinching" procurement officers of not caring for the troops, is probably wrong. More so than malice, individual incompetencies and/or a dysfunctional system could be the driving factor(s) behind symptoms that you see.
