Original Date: 02/24/1997
Revision Date: 04/14/2003

The US Army Industrial Operations Command (IOC) has implemented the Single Process Initiative (SPI) to reduce its contractors’ costs, resulting in reduced cost to the Army. The SPI promotes the use of common processes at contractor facilities. On a facility-wide basis, contractors are allowed to adopt common processes or commercial practices that meet the customer’s requirements.

In the past, the Army, Navy, and Air Force would procure items on contracts. Each imposed service- specific requirements for similar manufacturing and management processes, such as inspection systems, statistical process control, and reporting requirements. To meet service-specific requirements, contractors would develop multiple in- house ways of performing the same or similar processes. This added unnecessary cost to the procurement, increased the contract management burden, increased the administrative cost, and resulted in multiple, redundant, overlapping, and non-value added requirements.

The SPI is a product of Acquisition Reform. By allowing the contractor to implement one system for common processes, the customer’s requirements could be met at less cost. Motorola, located in Scottsdale, AZ, was one contractor where SPI has been applied. Four inspection systems were replaced with ISO 9001, with a cost avoidance of $171,000. Multiple standards for Electrostatic Discharge control processes were replaced by ANSI/EIA-625, with a cost avoidance of $36,000. A new uniform single purchasing system was incorporated using new Federal Acquisition Regulation clauses which reduced oversight, inspection, documentation, and administrative lead time associated with the purchasing system. The total cost avoidance is estimated to be $145,000. Four military and DoD standards related to software development were replaced by a Motorola standard comparable to commercial standard EIA/IEEE J-STD-0116. Other military standards were replaced by an equivalent industry standard. As a result, less reliance was placed on inspection and more reliance was placed on statistical process control. The SPI has been successfully applied to multiple contracts, and will be applied to many additional contracts. The successes to date have shown that Acquisition Reform is working to reduce the burdens on contractors and reduce the end-item cost to the government.

For more information see the Point of Contact for this survey.