Managing supply chain risks in government acquisitions programs
Creators: name: Gerlovin, Irene
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2017

description: The combined capabilities and performance of US weapon systems are unmatched throughout the world, ensuring that US military forces have the advantage over any adversary .  The US government spends huge amounts of capital and manpower to develop and acquire advanced equipment for defense purposes. Unfortunately, only a few of such acquisition programs were successful . Many of them, including F-35 and F-22, seem to have failed than succeeded. The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has reported extensively on problems in cost, schedule overruns, and performance breakdowns for major defense acquisition programs. Combining multiple case studies (on F-35 and F-22 programs) and a statistical analysis of the FY2015 Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAPs) data from GAO, we look into the frequent challenges encountered by such programs. Focused on the areas of: program management and supply chain risk management, we will explore industry and government prospectives.   Our objective is to shed light on a fundamental issue in government acquisitions: “What conditions are necessary for successful procurement?”  Identifying these conditions can lead to increased efficiency by helping the stakeholders to determine best practices and allocation of resources.     This thesis first provides a statistical analysis on the data of FY2015 Portfolio of MDAPs, with the objective of identifying statistically significant factors for the delays and cost overruns. We provide an overall assessment on the performance of these programs, and study the impact of project age, quantity changes, service type and contractor on the total acquisition cost overrun, unit cost overrun and the schedule delay.    Based on public data, collected from GAO’s reports and other publicly available sources, we identify issues in program and supply chain management practices of two large-scale acquisitions (F-22 and F-35). We compare the similarities and differences between the two MDAPs led by the largest global defense contractor, Lockheed Martin (LM). Our event analysis looks into the causes for the major delays and setbacks of these programs, outlines the important challenges on schedule, cost and execution in MDAPs, and relates the causes to their program and supply chain management strategies. We analyze and classify the causes by technical, managerial and governmental categories, provide the lessons learned, and recommend remedial strategies. We also provide a game theory explanation of the rationales behind the delays and cost overrun, and comment on the best practices and recent changes of the government’s regulations / policy.    This dissertation contributes to the literature of government acquisitions in the following ways: First, despite the significant news media coverage of the two fifth-generation tactical aircrafts, there is no comprehensive case study (and event analysis) on them. Our research is the first attempt to systematically collect, summarize and analyze the major setbacks of these programs; Second, unlike the literature that focuses mostly on program management, our work also takes the supply chain management perspective by studying and tracking the performance of, not only the major contractors, but also their supply chains, and their roles in the development and setbacks of the programs; Third, our statistical analysis of the FY2015 MDAPs data, provides additional perspectives and insights on the driving factors behind cost overrun and schedule delays, as well as their connections.