March 17, 2014

UCOR: SUBCONTRACTING APPROACH ALLOWS ACCELERATION OF CLEANUP WORK

By ExchangeMonitor

Oak Ridge cleanup contractor UCOR’s recent decision to complete subcontract work through staff augmentation has resulted in savings that have already led to acceleration of efforts, contractor President Leo Sain said yesterday. Earlier this year UCOR cancelled several subcontracts and announced that it was taking a new approach. Instead of having companies manage tasks, the contractor will self-perform most work and hire additional employees as needed through staff augmentation subcontracts. That decision has resulted in $14 million in savings, which made possible an acceleration of efforts at the site’s K-27 building, Sain said. “What drove us to a subcontracting strategy change was we had to come up with more cost savings,” Sain said at a Congressional Cleanup Caucus Briefing. “Let me add, what we needed for K-27 to pull it forward and do the characterization starting in April, it was close to $14 million. Pulling the K-27 forward happened within the last two or three months and our subcontracting strategy change occurred in the last couple of months.”

While companies interested in subcontracting with UCOR have expressed frustration with the decision, Sain said that the company is still on track to meet its goal of subcontracting 70 percent of the work by the end of its second year. “Now, in the short term I understand that there are companies that don’t like that. They’d rather have a turnkey contract,” he said. “In the short term, some folks don’t like it. In the long term, though, it’s going to be beneficial to subcontractors and everybody else, because if we are successful and we get to take on more of this cleanup work then there is going to be more subcontracting. Our commitments to subcontracting have not changed.”

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