[D.] Haggstrom [Principal Executive Director, Office of Acquisition, Logis- tics, and Construction], who’s the Acting Chief Acquisition Officer at VA, which is comparable to the Army Acquisition Executive. All three of them have been very, very supportive, and their predeces- sors as well, for changes that we’ve made here in VA. Believe me, we’ve made some, and we need to make a lot more to get us where we need to go.
There have been, and there are, a lot of opportunities for standardization and con- solidation, or strategic sourcing, if you will, of products across VA and DoD. VA is a major player in the national health care arena; DoD is as well. We serve the same people, albeit at different times of their careers. Some substantial savings have been achieved, and more could be achieved.
In our hospitals here in CONUS, we prob- ably use about the same things. Obviously overseas in war zones, the forward- deployed medical commands use some different things because of their forward- deployed posture. But things that come to mind are what we call durable medical equipment, or DME, from wheelchairs to hearing aids like I’m wearing. We’ve agreed on what hearing aids we will pro- vide to our constituents, to our clients, and we combine our spend. We buy most of DoD’s hearing aids out of VA’s Den- ver Acquisition and Logistics Center. We average a cost per unit of $348. That is in comparison to a retail cost for the same units of $1,200 to $3,000.
We have captured 20 percent of the U.S. market, between DoD and VA, for hear- ing aids. Best of all, we’re getting the best technology available.
Major medical equipment is another arena where we can do a lot more. If we were to combine the total spend for high-tech or
I WANT TO LET YOU KNOW THAT EVERYTHING THAT I KNOW ABOUT CONTRACTING, I LEARNED FROM THE ARMY.
major medical equipment and then use that spending power to negotiate with suppliers, I believe we could drive the prices down for a significant advantage for both DoD and VA. We are doing it to some degree now, but I think there’s more progress that we could make. CT [computed tomography] scanners, MRIs [magnetic resonance imaging machines], those are very, very expensive. We buy millions of dollars worth of them across VA every year.
Those are just two examples.
Q. VA has taken significant steps, with your leadership, to build up its contract- ing workforce. What can the Army learn from VA acquisition to foster profes- sionalism, innovation, and risk-taking through hiring, assignment, and promo- tion practices?
A. First of all, I want to let you know that everything that I know about contract- ing, I learned from the Army. The Army allowed me to serve in the contracting arena for 20 of my 30 years, even before the Acquisition Corps was developed.
Here’s what I found when I got here in 2005: Our procurement workforce here was not nearly as capable as the Army’s. They weren’t as well led as the Army’s procurement workforce, they weren’t as well trained, and there was no acquisi- tion corps. The Army implemented the
”
Acquisition Corps 22 years ago. We had none here. And there was virtually no program management culture. So I’ve expended a lot of effort, a lot of resources to improve training, the culture, and pro- fessionalism. But we’ve got a long way to go.
Let me give you an example: We’re in the process of implementing the VA Acquisi- tion Corps à la Department of the Army because that’s what I learned. And Secre- tary Shinseki directed us to do that last year. Fortunately, I already had an effort going, so we’re about to stand that up.
We have a very professional IT [informa- tion technology] contracting organization. Just two years ago, we could barely put an IT contract in place. But there happened to be a BRAC [Base Realignment and Clo- sure move] at a place called Eatontown, NJ, at the Army’s Communications- Electronics Command [CECOM]. When I found out about it, I presented the idea to the leadership here, said that what I thought we needed to do was move up there and see what professionals we could retain at Eatontown. We did so, did it very, very quickly. And we eventually will have over 250 people on the ground put- ting contracts in place, totally dedicated to IT contracting. It’s the U.S. Army that set the stage there.
We were way behind the curve in terms of training, and consequently I conceived
ASC.ARMY.MIL 99
”
CRITICAL THINKING
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180
