Description
Organization: NAVSEA, NSWC Dahlgren Division
Team Name: Mr. Cooper
Related Acquisition Topic(s): Acquisition Practices Streamlining, Integrated Product Teams (IPT), Paperless Contracting, Partnering
Description:
Mr. Dwight G. Cooper has provided his energy and his leadership skills to lead the Dahlgren Laboratory and sister NSWC Divisions into an automated and paperless environment by being innovative and customer focused by developing solutions that are more efficient and less costly. Mr. Cooper is known by his peers as someone who is constantly searching for more efficient and productive ways to provide quality support to the fleet.
There are numerous concrete examples of Mr. Cooper's commitment to automation and quality customer support. His hard work and innovation have lead to streamlining the acquisition process and developing paperless solutions to contracting for supplies and services.
Mr. Cooper saw a need to establish a working group consisting of contracting professionals representing each of the six contracting activities within the NSWC Divisions. The advent of the Standard Procurement System (SPS) was perceived as having the potential of making the most significant impact on the way contracting activities do business in many years. Mr. Cooper was instrumental in formulating and leading a Specific Task Team for SPS issues and initiatives. Under his leadership, the group formulated Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for use by NSWC activities covering such topics as Delivery Order preparation, Naming and Numbering Conventions, and Solicitation Generation. The STT has served as a forum for surfacing and finding work-arounds for problems found in implementing SPS, has developed a library for scripts for work-arounds, and has made numerous suggestions for improvements to SPS such as additional data fields for local information. Under Mr. Coopers leadership, the STT has formulated plans for the economical and efficient management of SPS, represented the interests of the NSWC community to higher command on SPS issues, and has begun the process of standardizing local clauses into a NSWC clause book.
Mr. Cooper has been instrumental in the application of the NSWC Standard Systems Adoption Process (SSAP) to SPS. SSAP provides a corporate-wide strategy for effectively inducting applications such as SPS into the NSWC Standard System of Systems. The Standard Systems of Systems consists of all of the automated systems; financial, travel, procurement, etc. The goals of SSAP process are 1) Standardizing a NSWC induction process, 2) Sharing information and resources across the NSWC Divisions, 3) Early identification of potential impacts to the current operating environment, 4) Continuous improvement of business and technological processes and, 5) Providing, with cost benefits and alternatives, potential technical and functional recommendations. For SPS, the SSAP process objectives are to provide a standardized efficient and cost effective process for NSWC to induct SPS into the NSWC Standard Systems of Systems and to reduce the duplication of effort at the individual sites by having a corporate induction strategy.
The SSAP will be used on the upcoming version 4.1a and subsequent versions of SPS to determine it's utility for the Warfare Center contracting process and how it interacts with existing NSWC Business Systems. Mr. Cooper has actively participated in the development of operational contracting scenarios to be used in a controlled environment to demonstrate how effective and efficient the updated version of SPS will operate, to validate any changes to standard operating procedures, and to develop work-arounds for any problems encountered in the operational environment. The results of these scenario tests will be shared with the entire NSWC community and with NAVSEA Headquarters so that when new versions of the software are developed, they will have full knowledge of the capabilities and problems, thus reducing significantly the time it will take to deploy this mission critical software. Results of the scenarios will be shared with the Navy's Component Management Office so that software improvements maybe recommended to the DoD Program Management Office for future software versions.
Another outcome of the SSAP will be recommendations on the most efficient method to deploy SPS from an infrastructure standpoint. Currently each NSWC site has it's own data base, it's own server and it's own staff of SPS network administrators. The SSAP will test other deployment scenarios such as a single data base and a single network server maintained by a corporate network administrator versus the dispersed method currently used. The SSAP has significant potential for resource savings and the deployed of corporate solutions versus numerous individual activity solutions which are resources intensive in a resource scarce environment. Though Mr. Cooper's insight and vision the deployment of SPS and other future standard business systems will be deployment in a more efficient and corporate manner, thus saving the tax payer significant dollars that may be better utilized in direct fleet support.
Another example of Mr. Cooper's commitment to automating the procurement process and commitment to paperless contracting is the leadership role he assumed in the deployment of the Navy's Electronic Document Access (EDA) initiative. Mr. Cooper envisioned significant benefits through cost savings to the organization and to private industry through more accurate and expedited payment by posting awarded contracts to the Navy's web site versus providing numerous "hard copy" contracts to the various payment offices, contract administration offices, technical customers and local comptroller organizations.
Mr. Cooper setup training classes for key individuals who would be involved in the EDA initiative and also shared his expertise in EDA concepts and execution by providing training to contracting personnel at another NSWC site. Mr. Cooper insured that key people are able to access the Navy EDA web site, that each understood the overall objectives of the EDA initiative and it's importance in obtaining the DoD goal of paperless acquisition processes by the year 2000, and that there was sufficient hardware and software to create the required electronic documents.
The Dahlgren Laboratory's implementation of EDA has been a total success as a result of Mr. Cooper's dedication to automating the procurement process and taking steps to reduce costs through the use of automation. NSWCDD has been identified as the only NSWC site EDA compliant by the ASN RD&A. Mr. Cooper's insight and energy have moved the Dahlgren Laboratory closer to a paperless process and more importantly made the procurement process more efficient and more responsive to our customers.
The impacts of Mr. Cooper's work will be realized for many years within the NSWC. His insight will allow for a paperless contracting process that will be more efficient and less labor intensive. With the electronic posting of awarded Government documents, vendor bills will be paid quicker and with greater accuracy. These automation initiatives will allow procurement personnel to be more responsive to critical customer requirements.
