Tom Weikart is corporate director of global strategic sourcing for ITT (White Plains, NY). He explains that supplier diversity at ITT is handled by two separate groups: site procurement folks at the company's many facilities, and centralized strategic sourcing, which was created a year ago with Weikart as its head. He joined ITT from Honeywell, "very specifically to define the sourcing strategy and create the consolidated capability for the company," he says.
Centralized sourcing at ITT is "a virtual team, geographically dispersed all over," in China, India, many European countries and the U.S. Its focus is the global supplier base for both direct and indirect purchasing, and "We look at the diversity of our supplier base as part of that."
When ITT decided to track its outreach to M/WBEs, "We utilized our small business council to create diversity objectives, like goals of a percentage of spend.
"For our defense work, we have a significant portion of the spend already in place because of requirements from customers and our long-standing focus," Weikart reports. "In the commercial sector, every time we conduct a major sourcing event we try to include new, diverse suppliers in our bidding process. We use the same basic philosophy with both direct and indirect sourcing."
Diversity large and small
A diverse supplier, he explains, could be a small M/WBE, but it could also be "a global business owned in Mexico or Asia or any of the different regions. We want both our company personnel and our supply base to represent the diverse nature of where we do business."
When considering a supplier large or small, diverse or mainstream, "We look at the quality of management and the company's financial position. Large and small to us only matters to the extent that the supplier can support us and meet our needs."
The ITT website, Weikart adds, has a section on doing business with ITT that provides contact names at facilities around the world.
Site procurement in Indiana
Beth Sowers is director of procurement for ITT's Aerospace/Communications division (Ft Wayne, IN). While Tom Weikart is ITT's global strategic sourcing lead, it's the site procurement folks like Sowers who are on the ground working on specific applications of the company's supplier diversity commitment.
One of Sowers' diverse suppliers is Laguna Industries, an MBE, DBE and SBA 8(a) technical manufacturing, defense-related business.
Laguna: A Native Pueblo with modern ideas
Walter Johnson, Sr is interim president/CEO of Laguna Industries, Inc (Laguna, NM), a tribal business owned by the Pueblo of Laguna and located on the Laguna reservation, just west of Albuquerque, NM. The company was federally chartered in 1984.
Business visitors, Johnson notes with amusement, "are amazed the first time they come out here.
"Of course we're located on the reservation, so they ask, 'Where are the teepees? Can you guys really get satellite TV out here?'"
Despite the small town and small company feel, the bottom line, Johnson says, is that "We do business with ITT, General Dynamics, Raytheon: pretty much all the big defense contractors." And now the company is diversifying into supply chain management on the manufacturing side, beginning with cable work for ITT. "We are used to building complete units, not components. This is a totally different mindset for us," Johnson notes.
Laguna Pueblo covers half a million acres of land. About 6,000 Native American members live on the reservation, most in its six villages. Also on the Laguna reservation are five semi-pro baseball teams, two casinos, the former site, now remediated, of one of the richest uranium fields in the world, and several thriving businesses involved in energy, telecom, IT, high-end manufacturing and technical services.
Laguna Industries, Inc is an electronic fabrication/tech services business with annual revenues approaching $20 million. "Of our seventy employees, 80 percent are tribal members. Although we have a number of engineers, at first people don't think of us in connection with the world of sophisticated technology," Johnson says.
Outsourcing to Laguna
Beth Sowers explains that Ft Wayne's relationship with Laguna Industries, Inc goes back ten years or more. In the past year, though, the relationship has reached a new level, as the division partners with the Native firm, sharing technologies and providing lean training.
The reason is outsourcing. "We've established this relationship to outsource cable assembly and other work that we used to do internally," Sowers says. ITT hopes that additional opportunities to expand the relationship will develop soon.
Mentor-protégé
ITT's three-year mentor-protégé agreement with Laguna, signed last year, "is our first such formal arrangement approved by the government," Sowers discloses. "ITT has always had a very active small business program and we've helped a lot of small, diverse businesses, but this was our very first formal agreement. It has been a rewarding experience for both us and Laguna.
"What we went forward with," she explains, "was agreeing to teach them lean practices, like lean manufacturing, lean order management and the whole lean toolbox of inventory control processes and improvements.
"We took them from their existing level of assembly work into the lean environment and made them a more competitive supplier in the marketplace.
"I think," says Sowers, "that there's a lot of benefit from understanding and utilizing small businesses and diverse businesses. They are able to be more flexible and provide a more rapid response, and they're so customer-focused.
"It's great to see a small diverse business like Laguna embrace these lean technologies and other improvements that have made us successful, and use them to become very competitive suppliers."
Technology transfer
A team of ITT people is supporting Laguna, Sowers notes. Mark Carpenter, a strategic sourcing specialist from her group, leads the effort. Other folks help out in areas ranging from solder training certification to manufacturing processes, supervision and, of course, lean principles.
"We're as determined and committed to make this work as Laguna is. We've both dug in to make it happen and I think this will be great and very successful for Laguna and for us on an ongoing basis," Sowers concludes.
About Laguna Industries
"We've been primarily a defense contractor, producing mobile communication systems for the Army, but a few years ago we started to expand into other markets," says interim CEO Johnson. "We're a certified HUBZone contractor, a certified small disadvantaged business and an MBE, of course. We started the SBA 8(a) program back in 1985, as soon as we were chartered, and graduated in 1994."
For nearly twenty years Laguna built several variants of the mobile communication systems. "But when you've put a thousand systems in the field the market tends to wind down, so we've moved into other areas." One is the Mobility Assessment Test and Integration Center (MATIC), built some five years ago.
MATIC is a very high-end test range created on the reservation by Laguna, and actually centered on the 9,000 acre site of the now-remediated uranium mine. Much of the area is usefully devoid of RF interference.
Launching MATIC
Laguna employees, together with techies from ITT and the Army, discovered that the RF spectrum over the reservation was extremely quiet, "almost to the point where there was nothing coming across," Johnson recalls. "We drove around the reservation in an SUV doing a signal analysis, checking to see what kind of transmissions were coming across the various frequencies, and there was no RF! It was very unusual.
"They were very surprised. They said, 'This has unique possibilities. This could be a very unique facility.' And that's how MATIC got started."
The environmental impact work, of course, had been done when the mine was remediated. "We just had to dig up the old paperwork. And after that we scheduled a meeting with the tribal council and explained that this large, void area where no one wanted to live or farm or ranch could generate revenue for the pueblo. 'We're going to go out and mine the sky instead of mining the ground,' we told them, and they agreed."
A very cool facility
The result, Johnson explains, is a unique test facility in New Mexico. "We went to Congress and got funding for four years. We built a 20,000 square foot facility in two separate phases and bought all the necessary test equipment."
The facility includes two EMI chambers and a chamber for cycling hot and cold as required by many military tests. But the biggest advantage, Johnson says, "is just the land, where customers can come and test their products, either before they go to market, or getting ready to go to an expensive test range like the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.
"We don't usually do weapon systems testing because the tribe doesn't like to see a lot of ordnance out there, but we've had people testing unmanned aerial vehicles in the form of hovercraft, balloons and even a para-sailer.
"We have laser testing, and of course we have people testing their networks. We have the whole reservation charted so they know where the dead zones are. It's a whole variety of things."
Inside the building there's a mission control room with a video wall. Data from anywhere on the reservation can be put into the system, "with a wireless link with wherever you want to test and wherever you want to send the results, all in real time. We are the only non-government experimental test range in the U.S. It's a very cool facility.
The overall objective, Johnson concludes, is "to continue to grow, with MATIC and our other businesses, so a Native engineer or technician can find a job without leaving home."
D/C
| 
