EB’s Year-End Town Hall was held at King’s Highway on December 17, 2018. Attendees and webcast viewers heard presentations from various members of the leadership team, including Jeff Geiger, Terry Fedors, Maura Dunn and Blair Decker. Prior to the town hall, a survey was sent out asking EB employees which topics they would like to receive an update on. Based on feedback, one of the most requested topics was the current state of EB’s supply chain.
Blair Decker, Vice President of Supply Chain, Materials and Strategy, included the following slide in his presentation. And while it may look like a simple series of numbers, Blair explained what each figure represented, demonstrating how crucial the Supply Chain organization is to the continued success of Electric Boat. See the explanation for each number below.
586 (~4%) = 1.78 B (>30%): The Supply Chain organization consists of 586 employees, making up roughly 4% of EB’s population. This group generates roughly $1.7 B worth of sales, making greater than 30% of the company’s revenue.
3,000 to 6,000 (was 17,000): There were 17,000 suppliers in the vendor base when we finished the 688 and the Trident program. EB went through a prescriptive draw-down of the supply base, leaving 3,000 suppliers. Now, in a time of growth, we’re hoping to grow the supplier base to around 6,000 suppliers.
750 – 1,000 is the number of requisitions that the inventory management organization generates every week.
> 90,000 is the number of transactions that occurred in the organization last year (The highest number of transactions in the last 30 years.)
42 months is the longest lead-time component that we buy for the ship (Main Propulsion Unit).
<1% of material comes from off-shore (Our product is essentially 100% made in America).
329 is the number of critical suppliers that we have in our industrial base.
“75% is a scary, scary number for me, and that’s the number of single and sole-source suppliers that we have in our vendor base. So at any given point in time, if one of those single or sole-source suppliers should go away at the most inopportune time, it creates a huge, huge amount of challenge for us from a business perspective if we have to recreate that capability or that capacity.”
98% is our percentage of material availability to work-order start for VA Class Block IV. 93% is the Columbia number.
~ 2 ½ x is the amount of material volume increase that we’re going to face from where we are today to where we’re going to be in the mid 20’s.
100% of people at EB get influenced, impacted or supported by the supply chain organization every day.
