ACQ 315: Understanding Industry

Description

This course provides insight into the industry perspective on the acquisition process.  Course materials cover an array of business insights including industry orientation, organization, cost and financial planning, business strategy/development, supplier management, incentives, and negotiating strategies. The skills to be acquired in this course include: aligning company strategies, finances, and operations that motivate company decisions to meet their business goals, gain fair and reasonable profits, while providing best taxpayer value to the government on defense products.  Participants will learn to leverage these insights to develop requirements and acquisition strategies that resonate with industry, promote competition, and motivate collaborative industry relationships resulting in fair and reasonable profits, while providing best taxpayer value to the government.

Learning Objectives

• Students will explain how scope and diversity of the current industry landscape influences companies’ methods of competing for defense contracts.
• Students will describe how a company’s organization adapts to strategy, resource capacity, and program phase.
• Using standard company financial reports and metrics, students will assess the company’s financial health to enable best-value program decisions.
• Students will explain cost accounting basics defense companies use to manage direct, indirect costs, and rates for proposals and program execution.
• Students will describe the importance of defense company cost estimating requirements, methods, and key process elements.
• Students identify and assess company management challenges in optimizing prime/subcontractor relationships and decisions in its supply chain.
• Students will assess opportunities and constraints companies weigh in prioritizing market opportunities, B&P resourcing, teaming, and strategy.
• Students will evaluate a company capture planning bid/no-bid decision process and an RFP response from the proposal development process.
• Students will apply the strategies defense companies use to incentivize their workforce at various levels.
• Students will develop a company negotiating strategy using business acumen tools that promotes a fair profit and better taxpayer deal.
• Given a company’s financial situation and market segment, students will evaluate the company’s annual decisions to “meet the numbers”.

Course Details

• Course Length – 4.5 Days
• Graded Materials Include: Case Study Familiarization, In-Class Assignments, Attendance of all Instructional Hours, and End of Course Test
• DAU Required Prerequisites:  CLC 013, Service Acquisition
• SCC offers this course virtually through the following: Adobe Connect, Microsoft Teams, Zoom for Government, and Google Meets.