BAE
 

Hopefully this will cause some good discussion.

After rubbish government decisions do BAE come second as responsible for the decline of the armed forces?

As it seems they royally **** up anything they get there hands on.

Has there been anything they have done that has been a roaring success for the military and on time :) ?

BAE has a monopoly over the 'defence' sector of the market, as such it means it is free to do as it damn well pleases, charge what it likes to an extent and generally be inefficient. I believe the reason for the mergers of the separate companies was that some were not doing well, but surely by breaking up BAE the competition produced by the resulting companies would help the market, and the British taxpayer's wallet?

I'm not sure whether there are any other defence companies who do this business that could turn out an ultra safe and current air platform, with the type of management processes being used today.

The complexity of modern systems, their integration, and the whole project management ethos, compete against it happening.

Changes that I saw happening on the MRA4 project, and the subsequent change in engineering direction, took sometimes months to happen. It was like turning a supertanker, painfully slow and cumbersome.
Every change that the PT kept making, and still make in current projects, screws up the whole process, sometimes requiring the engineer to have to go back to scratch. By the time a decision is made, some parts are obsolete, or have only a limited shelf life.

BAE are not alone in being late in delivery, and the lack of research and development, mitigates against rolling out any new project.

I loved my time on the Nimrod, and it is a great platform for maritime surveillance, but the a redesign of the whole aircraft, would surely have solved many of the problems. Crappy autopilot, over long flying control cable runs, fuel balancing linked to a poor C of G issues, too small a rudder etc etc
If it wasn't one thing it was going to be another, and I have a feeling it was going to go through several more problems, as it came into service.

BAES are not a monopoly in the defense sector. The last aircraft they produced on their own was the hawk. Aircraft and defence are a global industry. The Apache, C-130, C-17 and Dave are not BAE vehicles, yet are in or will be in the UK defense forces.

(As stated above) The problem is that all large companies move at the speed of frozen treacle and have to have stacks of red tape, sorry 'procedures' in place to ensure quality and conformity, as demanded by any reasonable customer. Do you really think that the customer doesn't change requirements during the process? Who foots the bill for that? do they allow a reasonable change to delivery date or make you absorb it in the current schedule?

If the contract limited costs, had proper risk sharing, reasonable methods to exert against change, and incentives/punishments then there is the chance it'll be successful. But all of that requries a special team of people to keep an eye on it and another layer of red tape.

I thought business culture was trying to move away from the blame game and move into a lessons learned culture.

I'm just a lowly engineer, that has witnessed the above rather than have been directly involved.

Speaking from an objective viewpoint, the MOD are as much to blame as BAE in most cases, never sticking to the original plan, wanting to make ridiculous changes in spec, then moving the goal posts once they are set. :ugh:..

The whole defence procurement policy is deeply flawed, and will remain an utter farce until the people on the coal face (From Sqn Execs to SAC's) get an input into the kit & equiptment we actually need..

The biggest problem the RAF has, quoting an old poster on here, is that if the RAF wanted a dog, they would buy a cat because it's cheaper, and give it surgery. :ugh:

The amount of useless kit we have turn up is comical, but a hideous waste of money. One of the prime examples was a tripod required to mount a peice of test equiptment, cost the RAF £10,000 :hmm:, googling the part number revealed an IDENTICAL item for £299.99 :D.. Who authorises these things? :mad:

Jimmy,
Absolutely right, however we may be moving away from the blame culture, but so far I haven't seen much evidence that lessons are learned and fed back into the process.
There is all too much of the box ticking culture, that Haddon-Cave warned against.

It is possible that Boeing and BAE have a totally different ethos on the contracts?

With Boeing they come up with a technical proposal to produce a system to meet the SOR. If a change is then required they will provide a cost estimate of such size that there is really no prospect for deviating from the original Spec. This means that their product can be produced in a standard form in a fairly short time scale.

BAE, OTOH, with no production line to start with will agree to any change in the SOR almost to keep the customer sweet and the money rolling in. The result? A rolling goat.

Is that about right?

Would it have been better to award an aircraft contract to BAE and a systems contract to a different contractor?

BAE Systems
 

Read the Defence Industrial Strategy from 2005 to see the extent to which BAE had successfully insinuated itself into the thinking of government and achieved preferential treatment:

http://www.mod.uk/nr/rdonlyres/f530e..._wp_cm6697.pdf

Sun Who

Largely immaterial,
lessons learned, I suggest, amount to this -

1) Do not give a British company a contract that isn't more watertight than a duck's ar$e

3) Don't let a civil servant oversee it, unless they have shown (via smaller contracts enroute) that they can actually run a contract without swapping a good dinner every three months for several million of taxpayers' cash.

8) Don't, for Christ's sake, let any senior officers near the trough, as they would sell Granny for a job in defence on retirement, and will happily sign anything as long as they get a non-executive directorship down the line.

14) Consider (in due course, in the fullness of time, when the moment is apposite, etc etc - insert 'Sir Humphrey speak' here as required') allowing somebody from the armed forces who knows what is needed to provide oversight - non technical advice, where somebody with an ounce of brains says 'we don't need that' and 'we do need this'... just by way of advice, like.

Naaah, it'll never happen, thank **** I'm old and won't have to see the final result of 'civilisation' on this moron inhabited planet....

Dave

(Paragraphs numbered iaw contract numbering regulations, dept of dead on accountancy, HMG).

Can someone remind me where BAes largest single customer base lies? :hmm:

DJB

I think you should come off the fence on this one...

As a push back, what did the 80-100 RAF pilots, navs, back-end operators, engineers, tradesmen, who were permanently based in the NW, integrated into the BAES organisation, with signing and veto powers, do for the last 15 years? Or did I miss something - did they all go native immediately they walked through the gates of hell onto an industry site, were they all intimidated into silence by the mighty industrial giant, or were their thoughts squashed at birth by their senior officers trying to line up a nice pension from 10 years out? Or are you just a bit wrong?

You can blame BAES if you wish, blame the government, blame life - blame everything.

A company THAT large does move like treacle, and in the course of these large projects the world moves on, things change.

Governments change, policy changes and the Armed Forces have to change in accordance with the latest policy shift (which may or may not be justified, but they are the Lords and Masters).

So the goal posts shift. It's not really anybody's fault, it's just life.

40 years ago, saying jobs-for-life would disappear would have been treated with derision. Sadly, it's the world we now live in.

But, if it makes you feel better, blame BAE. If not them, WHO are YOU going to choose? At least the jobs are generally British ones.

I think the problem was /IS that both the RAF and BAE were in the same bed together (and spooned too! but you'll have to guess who's in front)

The relationship was that of closeness but was too close. There didn't/doesn't seem to be any real supplier/customer relations - just relations!

To be efficient you need to be driven (by commerce?) not willing to wait for your friend to come up with some more excuses.

It's the reason that you shouldn't arrange for your in-laws to build an extension on your house. You'll just keep getting put further and further back on their list of "other" jobs.

In my experience most of the blame for the overpriced ineffective and obsolescent equipment entering service should be laid fairly and squarely at the door of MOD. The blue-suiters in MOD must carry the burden of this. Most of them in my day didn't seem to know what the Service needed or wanted and they changed faces at such a rate to pursue their careers that there was no continuity of decision making. Couple this with no commercial acumen and you have a system that any company could make hay with - and they did.

So far - we have RAF types being ineffective when on industry sites (see DJB), we have RAF types ineffective when in DE&S (see soddim); seems like we shouldn't be letting them loose off a station (other than when the world is perfect, sitting in the front or back of a US 'off the shelf' aircraft)!!

Someone probably insisted it went through a standard MOD validation & verification process for which the original manufacturer wasn't prepared to pick up the tab (because of the relatively small number of sales the MOD would order). There would be an outcry if the tripod was bought, went through all the rigmarole of being added to the stores system and then repeatedly failed in service. You can't have your cake and eat it.

Crumbs!
The ruddy incompetent MOD "leadership" hasn't got over the 1970's "£40 1/2lb Hammer" scandle/Scam yet!

...It's no wonder....

OK. two points to make
1. Any civillian contractor working on a military contract has to deal with the fact that every three years or so the customer (i.e. the officer he has been dealing with) gets posted and someone new comes along. That someone new has their own ideas of what they want, and wants to know why decisions have been made the way they have. This inevitably leads to changes in the specification.
2. Any change to the product, at any point in the process, requires time and money to implement. The figure I get quoted on a regular basis is "a thousand bucks just to change the drawings". That drawing change could be as simple as changing the part number, or sticking a label on.

So, from point 1 above, any new "customer" who wants changes will delay the project and cost money.:ugh:

And believe me, in order to do a thorough, professional job and not leave the company open to liability if something goes wrong, we the engineers have to take the time and money to get it right. BAE seem to be singled out a lot recently, but I reckon a lot of firms in the same line of business are saying "there but for the grace of god..."

Shouldn't that that order have come in at around errr the year 2000 ?

Where is it ?

Ok - who's dealing with it ?

Get your coat and get out.

Too late.

Post No 8 (Sun Who's link)

I had a look at that link to 'Defence Industrial Strategy', a weighty 5mb tome full of analysis, graphs etc and a very impressive photo of dozens of suits of the 'National Industries Defence Council' around a table on p18. It's hard to believe that no one in the photo was in denial about what was going to happen. As you say, BAe do feature pretty heavily!