PBR program success inspires Navy

  • Published
  • By Shannon Carabajal
  • AFCEC Public Affairs
JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-LACKLAND, Texas --  If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the Navy is paying the Air Force Civil Engineer Center a big compliment. A group of environmental engineers and contract specialists from the Naval Facilities Engineering Command recently spent two days with their counterparts at AFCEC and the 772nd Enterprise Sourcing Squadron to learn how the center executes fence-to-fence performance-based remediation contracts for the Air Force.

Within the Department of Defense, AFCEC has a mature, "envelope-pushing experience" on implementing the PBR contracting method for the environmental restoration program, said Gunarti Coghlan, an environmental engineer with NAVFAC headquarters.

"The team's wealth of knowledge provided the Department of the Navy with the needed overview and lessons learned to implement the tool for our program," she said.

Since 2011, AFCEC has been executing PBR contracts focused on accelerated site completion. The contracts allow for fence-to-fence investigation and remediation, and give the contractor flexibility to determine the best way to clean up environmental contamination. Contractors can also revise approaches without having to modify the contract. That freedom encourages innovation, saves money and eliminates delays, said Lee Conesa, environmental restoration division deputy for AFCEC's Environmental Directorate.

"PBR is a bigger contract that brings many sites into one. You put a bunch of sites in one contract vehicle and you say to the contractors, 'get us this end point (objective), by this date (time) and for this firm fixed price. We're buying the end result," Conesa explained.

Over the past four years, AFCEC has achieved considerable success with its program, awarding 45 PBR contracts worth $1.34 billion, covering 106 Air Force installations and 2,268 sites. The awarded contracts to date are planned to achieve $530 million in savings within the period of performance of the contract and $1.3 billion over the life cycle when compared to cost-to-complete estimates. 

"The effort was phenomenal, the success huge. As would be expected, we've learned a lot, we continue to learn and we continue to standardize processes where appropriate," said Ian Smith, the division's chief.

Members of the environmental restoration division and the 772nd ESS shared those experiences and lessons learned with the NAVFAC team. The Navy's team, impressed with the teaming and the rapid evolution of AFCEC's program, was grateful for the insight as they begin incorporating PBR contracts into its environmental restoration program.

Understanding that the PBR program represents a paradigm shift of emphasizing objectives and using them as measures of payment was among the top takeaways for the NAVFAC team.

"In the austere government financial climate, the optimum use of resources is important. AFCEC has demonstrated and implemented a new model in environmental restoration program execution that enhances innovation and (saves money)," Coghlan said.

For more information about the AFCEC Environmental Directorate, visit http://www.afcec.af.mil/environment/index.asp.