According to an article on military.com (hat tip to Jeff Dean, SPSM), the president of a supplier in the US Navy\u2019s supply chain has been sentenced to 41 months in prison. The article says that the offense of the supplier, Bristol Alloys Inc., was supplying a Navy subcontractor with metal that had not been heat-treated to meet contractual requirements for use in the building of submarines.<\/p>\n
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The consequences of this breach are extensive: the article says that it \u201ccould eventually cost the government more than $30 million to find and replace the metal parts used in the construction of submarines.\u201d The executive and his company were ordered to pay $1.35 million in restitution, but the likelihood of the government even seeing that relatively paltry sum is debatable given that \u201cneither one of the defendants has any assets of any significance\u201d and the company \u201chas done no business since the fall of 2009.\u201d<\/p>\n
It would normally be easy to point the finger at the government for failure to monitor its suppliers\u2019 performance, but it isn\u2019t so easy in this case. The submarines are built by a two-prime-contractor team of Electric Boat and Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding. Northrop Grumman bought various metal components from one of its suppliers which had, in turn, purchased metals and other parts from Bristol Alloys.<\/p>\n
So, the offending supplier was three tiers removed from the government. But shouldn\u2019t the government be looking further down the supply chain?<\/p>\n
Apparently not. The article notes that the Navy \u201chas not changed the way it accepts materials from a supplier based on this incident.\u201d<\/p>\n
Makes you wonder when something like this will happen again, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to an article on military.com (hat tip to Jeff […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":4016,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-procurement"],"yoast_head":"\n