Skills Shortages Keep Contractors Busy

Military and commercial operators are faced with the problem practically every day: they have a maintenance or support project that requires highly skilled maintenance technicians, but the scope of the work can't justify the hiring of additional full-time employees. As more and more government and commercial operators are discovering, the solution may be found in a contract maintenance arrangement.

L-3 Vertex Aerospace, a subsidiary of L-3 Communications's Integrated Systems division, supplies contract personnel to the U.S. military, government, and commercial operations around the world. As Dave Carothers, L-3's Contract Field Services general manager explained, the CFS program is really a series of indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contracts. Under these contracts, the company operates the contract field teams contract (CFT), and that's where most all the work gets done.

"The CFT is a contract endorsed by the Joint Logistics Committee and is available for use by all federal agencies," he explained. "It is primarily used by the DoD [Department of Defense] to augment depot and unit maintenance and logistics requirements."

Carothers said that the program currently has more than 4,000 highly skilled technicians working from 172 locations around the world. "The main reason the military or a commercial operator would decide to use a CFT-type program is that it is a soup-to-nuts solution to their maintenance and support needs," he added. "A point that needs to be made is that we are not a `body shop.' We take full responsibility for what we do. We manage everything from the quality, production, supply, and logistics functions, anything and everything associated with the project is our responsibility." And all of the work is guaranteed by a firm, fixed hourly rate that is pre-negotiated for the life of the project.

That type of total project and cost control along with the added flexibility of the CFT program is the future of contract maintenance, Carothers explained. "This type of contract inside of the government gives our customers a lot of flexibility, which means we can react to their needs very fast. In most situations, our customers need a problem solved today. They can't wait six months to a year to let a contract for support."

In military lingo, the CFT is sort of a rapid-deployment maintenance solution. The L-3 team goes in, does its job, and moves on, whether that job lasts two weeks or two years. "Easy access and rapid deployment are key assets," Carothers said. "Once the contract has been competed and the individual delivery orders are competed among the contract holders, each delivery order can be issued to support the requirement in less than seven days, and in an emergency, they have been issued in only 24 hours."

A case in point was how quickly L-3 Vertex's CFTs were able to respond during the early days of Operation Desert Storm. "We were notified on Thursday that we needed to have 100 skilled people in the desert the following week," Carothers said. "Our advance party left two days later and within eight days we had 100 technicians and their tool boxes on site."

Carothers said that L-3 Vertex CFTs are heavily involved in the current war efforts. "We are providing everything from unit-level to limited depot-level maintenance for U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps helicopters," he explained. "We're doing everything from general inspections to battle damage repairs and our team is right there with the regular military technicians. We were there at Baghdad International Airport three days after the troops took it."

Back in the U.S., L-3 Vertex's CFTs provide back-up labor to fill-in for short-handed National Guard/Reserve and active military bases. Carothers said that the intermixing of the L-3 contract technicians and the regular military technicians has an added benefit, "We have a lot of `gray-haired' expertise and that means inexperienced maintenance personnel in a military unit can receive a lot of over-the-shoulder training."

Of course, this type of "on-demand" maintenance expertise isn't only useful in the military. Carothers is quick to point out that while the military is by far the largest user of L-3's growing services, commercial operations including AAR, Boeing, Pratt & Whitney, and General Electric are using the company's contract maintenance capabilities. "The advantages to the program are that it is very flexible, user-friendly, and reasonably priced," he said. "It is designed to be easily and quickly implemented by anyone in either the military or commercial sectors anywhere in the world." -- By Dale Smith