Photo By Patrick Tremblay | Defense Contract Management Agency Northrop Grumman Bethpage transitioned out two...... read more read more
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BETHPAGE, N.Y. - Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Carty arrived to his new assignment with the Defense Contract Management Agency in March 2013, eager to support his Navy family. Carty was taking command of DCMA Northrop Grumman Bethpage, an in-plant contract management office that reports to DCMA Garden City. Only about eight miles separate the two Long Island, New York, offices, but the scope of the contracts they oversee are unique enough to warrant the additional oversight.
Carty knew of the work being performed in Bethpage. Any aviator would be excited to work in an area so rich in the history of flight, with a contractor that built some of the best known aircraft of World War II and the Cold War. What he didn’t know was a long, steady decline in the local aerospace industry would help define his first year at DCMA.
“Day one was basically the day Northrop Grumman made their announcement,” said Carty. Over the next 18 months two programs, the MQ-4C Triton and E-2 Hawkeye, would transition from Bethpage to other states. “That was day one.”
There are a number of places in the U.S. that can legitimately claim to be a center of aviation history. Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, of course, and Dayton, Ohio, where the Wright brothers designed and built the first powered planes, come to mind. But since the 1930s, the western part of Long Island was the place to be, and for decades it was dominated by Northrop Grumman. The F6 Hellcat was built there, as was the F-14 Tomcat, not to mention the Apollo lunar module.
At its peak in the 1980s, the contractor employed more than 20,000 people in Bethpage. Then a series of mergers and reorganizations in the 1990s led to production and jobs being moved to other parts of the country. The most recent downsize moved 850 workers out of the area, leaving just 550 working for the contractor. This was announced in March 2013 — the same month that Carty arrived to head DCMA’s presence in Bethpage.
“The folks here have been incredibly resilient, and incredibly professional,” Carty said. It was a tough time for the region in many ways — they had just gone through Hurricane Sandy, people were still getting their homes back together, and the contractor lost a huge chunk of their workforce. “We did all that, plus we went through furlough and the shutdown.”
Between the two programs, E-2 and Triton, 21 billets were transferred out of the office. This left Carty, a naval flight officer with operational tours in the S-3B Viking, with about 30 people to provide contract administration and quality assurance oversight for over 350 federal government contracts valued in excess of $1.5 billion.
The mission comes first for the Garden City and Bethpage team, but a critical part of making that happen is keeping an engaged, productive workforce. So in addition to servicing the Navy customer through a seamless transfer of the contracts, the CMO was concerned about taking care of its people, and retaining as many as possible.
“We’ve been fortunate that we’ve had a safe landing spot for everybody,” explained Carty. “We were able to find them jobs in their series, or at the least at their grade level. There were no downgrades.”
Neil Mintz, DCMA Garden City director, was instrumental in helping to retain the experienced agency employees.
“We’ve successfully transferred the two programs, and as a result of careful advanced coordination, successfully placed all personnel who did not desire to relocate into vacant positions,” said Mintz. “Our entire CMO showed a high level of dedication, professionalism and service. They continued to perform in an outstanding manner in a time of tremendous transition — they’re true professionals dedicated to the support of our mission and the warfighter.”
Carty added, “It was a tremendous success story working with the people who were on the contracts, and with DCMA Garden City. Long Islanders are a pretty hardy breed.”
The Triton program was the first to leave, transitioning in December 2013. The unmanned aerial vehicle provides surveillance for the Navy, held aloft by its 130-foot wingspan and Rolls Royce turbofan engine. Seven DCMA positions were moved to Palmdale, California, but none of the Bethpage employees followed. They were either absorbed by Garden City, or, in the case of John Bagni, into other work at Bethpage.
Bagni was the last DCMA Bethpage program integrator on the Triton. The Brooklyn native has been with DCMA for 26 years, and left a QA team lead position at Garden City to work on the Triton. About a month after he showed up, the announcement came that the program was moving.
“In accordance with major support program policy, there’s a whole list of things we’re required to do when transitioning a program from one CMO to another,” explained Bagni. “I put together a package and several of us went out to the West Coast to brief statements of work, delegations, status of work and other details.”
He said establishing face-to-face contact with the Palmdale office, and maintaining regular communication during the first few months, was critical to the move’s success. “Once we transitioned the contract we’d have weekly phone calls with Palmdale to discuss the status. They had to increase their staff to handle the program, so we helped while they were hiring.”
After careful planning, the program transferred in December. Bagni wrote the program status report for January, and Palmdale took over from there. “It wasn’t as involved as it was with the E-2. There were already delegations to Palmdale and they were much more involved and familiar with the program before the move.”
The E-2 left in September 2014. A carrier-capable, airborne early warning aircraft, the twin-engine E-2 is easily recognized by the 24-foot plate-like disk carried over its fuselage. Two of the 14 agency employees on the program moved with it to Melbourne, Florida. The rest were able to stay on Long Island.
“Lessons we learned from the Triton move made transitioning E-2 smoother,” said Carty. “We’d learned the human capital piece — how long it takes to move a body from point A to point B, and what the challenges were with that. We’d learned some lessons on how to transition a contract between two regions — what happens with delegations and what it does to your metrics. We tried to apply those lessons with the move to Melbourne.”
Like Bagni, Carty said the most important part of a successful move was getting all parties sitting in the same room. “Transitioning the E-2 included about $11.5 billion between aircraft, engineering and so forth. We were able to sit down with the new (administrative contracting officer) during the post award, and have conversations with (Naval Air Systems Command) contracts and with the program office. We made sure everyone was on board, everyone knew who was who, and let the customer know these people would be taking care of their needs from a DCMA perspective from now on. It was pretty valuable.”
The labor-intensive production work at the contractor may be no more, but there’s still a great deal of work to be done at DCMA Bethpage. The office is now the Electronic Attack Center of Excellence for Northrop Grumman, and the CMO works closely with DCMA St. Louis who is the lead CMO on the EA-18G Growler contract.
Bagni was able to stay at Bethpage, and is now the program integrator for Littoral Combat Ship Mission Modules — the other big program at the office. “The contractor at Bethpage is the integrator for LCS mission packages, containers that can be interchanged within a LCS sea frame as mission requirements dictate,” he explained. Like other programs there, it’s not production, but rather research, design, testing and management. And like many of the programs DCMA touches, it’s not confined to one office. The modules start on Long Island, but are integrated at Port Hueneme, California — 2,800 miles away.
| Date Taken: | 06.24.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 06.25.2015 14:26 |
| Story ID: | 168140 |
| Location: | BETHPAGE, NY, US |
| Web Views: | 245 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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