How to beef up acquisition

Hardly a week goes by without another commission, foundation or think tank issuing a report on acquisition reform, and how to do it. Plus, several competing bills that would reform acquisition are at various stages in the meat-grinder that is Congress.

One ad hoc group preparing advice for reform is the IT Acquisition Advisory Council, a sort of catholic (note the small "c") collection of lifetime acquisition junkies. Its report draft notes that since the demise of the Brooks Act back in the mid 1990s, some 130 acquisition studies and reports have been issued.

My own feeling is probably no reforms or new laws are needed, just better training in the existing rules and more people to do the government's business so that individual projects get more attention.

Acquisition is like a person I know who is too old to be called middle aged and too young to be called elderly. She takes about 30 different pills a day for various aches and ailments. If she flushed all of them down the toilet and went for a good walk every day, she'd probably feel like a million bucks. Too much medicine is counterproductive.

Most of the acquisition reforms proposed, though, do suggest hiring more acquisition professionals. The Defense Department is already adding more.

Here is my suggestion: Open up a federal acquisition center of excellence in Detroit. I'll bet you could find one of the government's 65,000 underused buildings somewhere, so right away stimulating fix-up money would flow into one of the true urban basket-cases in the U.S.

Populate the federal acquisition center with retired or laid-off purchasing and program managers from the rapidly-shrinking Detroit-based auto industry. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have laid off thousands of white collar workers, many of them with experience as tough negotiators.

These people would need training in the government acquisition laws and regulations, but they would bring to the government deep skills at program and supply chain management.

Many years ago I went to the headquarters of Ford in Dearborn. My purpose was to interview a man, now deceased, named Lionel M. Chicoine. As Ford's vice president for purchasing and supply, he was a big dude in the auto industry. He had an office which seemed to occupy an acre of floor space in the Glass House, Ford's headquarters building complex. (David Halberstam, in his 1988 masterpiece, "The Reckoning", quoted the legendary Henry Ford II reminding people that Ford Motor Company headquarters "is wherever I happen to be" at any given moment.)

I thought, how intimidating it must be for Ford suppliers and wannabes to enter that office, with the massive desk of Mr. Chicoine at the far opposite corner from the door. The fact is that car industry buyers have always been some of the toughest, shrewdest and most ruthless negotiators known to man, forcing suppliers to shave fractions of cents of a given part.

Like the government, the auto industry buys in big quantities, at one time accounting for double digit percentages of the steel, coatings, castings, glass, plastic and electrical components consumed by U.S. industry. And when a car is set to be introduced, the date is sacrosanct, and the companies wouldn't stand for slippage from suppliers. Car industry buyers are not squeamish about demanding to see suppliers' books, poking around their factories, examining their processes, all to look for efficiencies.

In the good years, Ford alone purchased something like $90 billion worth of goods and services. As a whole, the purchasing and supply management scale of the industry is on an order of magnitude of the government.

Besides, there is precedent for auto industry expertise coming to Washington. Robert F. McNamara, the father of the Falcon (well, you can't win 'em all) was a transformational Defense Secretary for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Earlier, GM President Charles Wilson became President Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense, having directed GM's prodigious World War II production efforts.

Think people like that could help out the federal government in its complex projects today? I do.

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