By Billy Morrison
Twenty-five years ago this week, the Energy Facility Contractors Group was born.
After receiving the thumbs up from then-Secretary of Energy James Watkins early in 1991, a group of executives from the Department of Energy’s management and operations contractors met the first week of December 1991 to officially form EFCOG, approving a charter and electing officers.
EFCOG’s mission was the same then as it is today: enabling complex-wide information sharing to ensure excellence in DOE operations.
Likewise, the approved charter embraced certain key principles that continue to form the basis for EFCOG operations: EFCOG will not engage in lobbying; EFCOG will not intervene in any way in the direct communication between any individual member company and the DOE; EFCOG is not a DOE contractor advocacy organization and will not take or promulgate independent positions on issues, regulations, DOE orders or other areas of contractor concern.
Over the last quarter century, EFCOG’s work has saved the Department of Energy millions of dollars through the sharing of best practices and lessons learned in a host of areas vital to the successful completion of DOE’s mission, including safety, security, waste management, project delivery and training.
More importantly, DOE and EFCOG have successfully partnered to make operations across the complex safer, more efficient, and more effective.
One of the key areas where that partnership has been particularly valuable over the past decade has been contractor assurance. An effective Contractor Assurance System (CAS) provides a level of confidence that a contractor is identifying and fixing its own issues before bigger issues become self-revealing.
With recent DOE policy placing increased value, attention, and scrutiny on effective CAS, the need to assess how well a CAS is functioning with a high degree of transparency has taken on increasing priority.
This fall, EFCOG formed a joint senior level EFCOG/DOE Task Team to identify a consensus approach for determining whether or not a CAS is effectively implemented. A diverse team of senior industry leaders are set to deliver an EFCOG Best Practice Guide to be used by DOE contractors by April 30, 2017.
Because of its importance and complexity, CAS is a process that benefits from individual companies and organizations sharing lessons learned and best practices to more effectively implement and assess its effectiveness. Improved long-term performance could be achieved by DOE and its contractors using a common approach to assess CAS effectiveness. This would be evident from improving productivity coupled with reduced severity and significance and frequency of events.
In tackling issues like CAS effectiveness, there is a common thread that ties the first elected EFCOG chair, Karen Clegg of Allied Signal/Kansas City, through each of the men and women who have held the position in the ensuing 25 years and continuing with the current EFCOG board and support team today—a commitment to true partnership between contractors and DOE to continuously improve operations.
As we look to the next 25 years and beyond, EFCOG stands ready to support DOE in performing these vitally important national security and environmental missions.
The author is the Chairman of the Energy Facility Contractors Group and President of Kurion Veolia Federal Services.
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