Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/533940
S Shipbuilding www.vanguardcanada.com JUNE/JULY 2015 27 sensus, she said. Furthermore, recent experience with the JSS project suggested two competing teams might be problematic since a constrained budget and complex requirements remain critical variables. As she explained, "in [the JSS] project we were unable to work with the two competing teams to reconcile re- quirements with budget. These cost-capability tradeoffs are not easily done because the two teams and the government officials with whom they work must be kept firewalled from each other to ensure fairness in the competition. This does not allow the government to modify requirements based on innovative design approaches proposed by the companies without being exposed to considerable legal risk. Ultimately, in the case of the JSS proj- ect, an inability to do those tradeoffs resulted in bids that were well over budget." By competitively choosing the ship designer and systems inte- grator, and then having them work in collaboration with Irving and the government to select the various systems, subsystems and equipment, the government hopes to retain options and manage cost that might be limited in a two team approach "where we would expect extensive teaming arrangements early in the process," she said. "There may be innovations out there that we can take advantage of as the procurement progresses and we want to maximize that to the extent possible." Calling it a layered approach, the senior official from National Defence said that while the intent is not to "force any marriages, there is so much at stake [that] we have said we will be intrinsi- cally involved and, in fact, we will lead and select what will be the first tier suppliers around the combat systems integrator and the ship designer. But the shipyard will be involved as the people who will sign the contracts and will have to lead the team." Through a series of design spirals with the various parties, the – have been incorporated into an approach that will seek to address one of the JSS program's larger challenges: squaring a constrained budget with ambitious technical requirements. The CSC budget envelope remains $26.2 billion for up to 15 ships in two variants, but the strategy has evolved from op- tions previously shared with the shipbuilding industry to a hy- brid approach that aims to reconcile that budget-requirements equation up front. That could mean an expanded budget or a reduced number of ships by the time the government puts pen to paper and issues contracts some time in 2017. iMpORTAnT AS iT WAS to fairly select the shipbuilder in 2011, the electronic systems and subsystems are the focal point for the naval industry. They have been described as the "crown jewels" of the CSC project and the raison d'etre for the warships, and government and industry engagements over the past three years have been rife with speculation about how best to proceed in selecting them. In 2012, the options included a bake-off between design teams; an assessment of best corporate capability; a government- led system by system competition; and a strategy under which the shipyard would choose the designer and systems integrator. By late 2013, that appeared to have been whittled down to ei- ther selecting the "most capable design" or the "most qualified team." During the technical briefing, however, the senior official from PWGSC explained that the government had in recent months been weighing the merits of two potential approaches: competitively choosing and funding a single design team or competitively selecting and funding two design teams. While each had some industry support, there was no con-